Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

  “But it’s about me, after all,” Köves interposed, somewhat unsure of himself, though not at all as if he had been persuaded, more because he was interested in what the department head was saying, yet he again seemed to be astonished:

  “About you? Who’s talking about you? What role are you marking out for yourself, apart from doing what you’re told?!” And with his face now flushed like someone incapable of containing his enthusiasm, he called out: “We are servants, servants, each and every one of us! I’m a servant, and you’re a servant too. Is there anything more uplifting than that, more marvellous than that?”

  “Whose servants?” Köves got a word in.

  “Of a higher conceptualization,” came the answer.

  “And what is that conceptualization,” Köves got in quickly, as if he were hoping he might finally learn something.

  The question must have been over-hasty, however, because the department head stared mutely at him, as if he could not believe what he was hearing, and then he again glanced at the document that he was warming under his palm:

  “Of course,” he spoke finally. “You’ve returned home from abroad.”

  All the same, he answered the question Köves had asked, though by now in a much drier tone:

  “Unbroken perfectionism.”

  “And of what does that consist?” Köves, seeming to have already accepted that he was a journalist once again, yet was not to be deflected.

  “Our trying ceaselessly to put people to the test.” The department head at this point indicated, with a brusque flip of the hand, that they had exhausted the subject and should revert to practical matters. “Consider it a piece of good luck,” he said, “that you’ve been noticed,” and it seemed that his words had a sudden sobering effect on Köves as well.

  “I don’t want good luck,” he said, now in the same dry, determined tone and with a feeling he had already said that before to someone, even if then he may have been even less well-armed against luck than he was now. “I want to be a worker,” he went on, “a good worker. If I understand something, then …,” he hesitated slightly, but then he must have decided there was little risk to laying his cards on the table: “then you can’t trifle with me so easily.”

  The department head, however, evidently appreciated his openness, his expression now all goodwill, his voice ringing warmly:

  “A good worker,” he said, “is the last thing you’ll be. Either you leave here or you won’t come to anything. After all, you haven’t even learned how to file yet.” He fell silent, looked at Köves with his head slightly tipped to one side, then, with a friendly smile to balance, as it were, the harshness of what he had to say, he carried on: “In point of fact, we could dismiss you. You simply don’t come up to the requirements, after all. However,” he swiftly tagged on, “naturally we would prefer it if you were to accept our offer of your own free will,” and here Köves was all at once overwhelmed by a bottomless weariness which had actually never left him since he had arrived there.

  They exchanged a few more words, with Köves most likely also signing something, after which the next thing he noticed was that, as on so many occasions already during his stay there, he was leaving an office with unsteady steps, without knowing anything more than he had when he entered, and he thought, with a certain amount of shame, of the girl’s beseeching, then uncomprehending, and finally, no doubt, astonished expression when he later packed his things together and left the factory without saying a word.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In a South Seas refraction

  That evening, Köves turned up once more at the South Seas, spinning in through the revolving door and making a beeline for Sziklai’s table, where he was sitting in exactly the same pose as when he last took leave of him, and a broad smile now brightened and then cracked the hard face into tiny shards, as if all he had been waiting for ever since was Köves’s arrival.

  “What’s ‘my literary talents’ supposed to mean?!” Köves waded in, throwing himself down on one of the chairs without even asking, and the smile froze slightly on Sziklai, who had no doubt been counting on a more cordial reunion.

  “What it’s supposed to mean?… I don’t understand …,” he mumbled, his face still reflecting, on the one hand, the joy of seeing Köves again but now also, on the other, a touch of disappointment, whereupon Köves related what had happened that morning:

  He had been handed his papers for the job at the steelworks and told to present them at the press department of the Ministry for Production, and without delay moreover, lest the greater part of the remainder of the working day be lost, and in order that Köves might be set immediately to work at the Ministry, should they see fit. Köves had rushed from one tram to another—the Ministry was near the city centre, a long way from the factory—as if he had been handed some extraordinarily fragile public property: his time, which he had to deliver perfectly intact to its destination, taking care, above all, not even to dream of pilfering any part of it for himself. This near-missionary feeling, as if it were not him who was arriving, or rather it was him, except representing himself, so to say—that easiness had helped him through the usual stumbling blocks with which he had to grapple at the porter’s lodge in order that, ID card in hand, he should then make his way between the two customs men at the main entrance. Köves had raced, panting, up stairs and along corridors until he had, at last, found the press department, where it had turned out that he would have to wait as the press chief just happened to be dealing with something else. “He’s in a meeting with the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee,” disclosed the typist—herself busy now clattering at her typewriter, now reaching for ringing telephones—in a voice that switched to a more confidential tone after she learned from Köves what had brought him there. “I see,” Köves commented, somewhat dazed, his face but then gradually recovering an intelligent expression, as though he were suddenly sobering up from a bout of intoxication and, with some primitive instinct, which seemed all at once to resuscitate the torpidity of his original nature, was already settling himself on what was, presumably, the most comfortable chair in the room. Now, of course, it would not occur to him, Köves smiled to himself, to rush the padded door; or if it did (as it had indeed just occurred to him), then not in the least with any disposition to act, at most the glint of a memory, an almost painfully exquisite memory that he had preserved of himself. What a child he had still been back then, Köves reflected, as though musing on times long gone. When had that been? Yesterday? Twenty years ago, perhaps? Ever since arriving in the country, Köves had always had a spot of trouble with time; while living it, it seemed interminable to him, but when he thought about it as the past, it seemed practically nothing, with a duration that might have fitted into a single hour, in all likelihood, the thought crossed Köves’s mind, an idle hour at a twilight hour in another, a more real, one might say a more intensive life, somewhere getting on suppertime, when a person has nothing better to do, nor does it does matter anyway, and ultimately, it fleetingly occurred to Köves, an entire lifetime was going to pass like that, his life, on which he would eventually be able to look back with the thought that he could have seen to it within the space of a single hour, the rest being a sheer frittering away of time, difficult living conditions, struggle—and all for what? At that moment Köves would have found it hard to say what; it was more just the sense of struggle that lived in him, of effort, without being able to see more exactly, or at least suspect, the object, let alone the purpose, of that struggle, though of course it could have been he was just tired, as usual, his intermittently failing reason maybe only indicating his exhaustion, the toe-curling boredom of the struggle. Maybe his mind was wandering, although it did not escape his attention that a woman and, immediately after her, a man hurried out from behind the padded door and crossed the room heading straight for the door—so Köves noticed that she was a good-looking woman who, through her hair and probably also her dress, left him with a fleeting impression of the y
ellowish-reddish-brown coloration of ripe chestnuts, whereas the man, diminutive, dapper, and with a moustache, whose jerky movements seemed as to be explaining something, striving to detain the woman, who was hurrying off wordlessly, without looking back and, improbable as it was, he appeared to have a flower adorning the buttonhole of his jacket—Köves continued to keep his eyes on the half-open inner door, waiting for the press chief and the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee, who, for whatever reason, he imagined as being an elderly, sturdy, bald or silver-haired man. It seemed, though, that he was wrong: after accompanying the woman to the door, it was the fastidious manikin himself who returned and, for the first time, cast a distracted and, outwardly, in some way drawn gaze first at Köves, then at the typist, who now announced in a soft, impatient voice that this was Köves, “the new colleague,” at which the man, a spasm of pain flashing across his face, asked Köves to “be patient for just a little longer,” and then vanished behind the padded door, which meant Köves had seen the press chief after all, and therefore the woman who had departed just beforehand could only be the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee. Shortly after, the handset on the typist’s desk buzzed. Köves looked at the typist, she at Köves, and Köves got up from the seat and headed for the padded door with the happy yet unsettling feeling that “their eyes met and they were in accord.” The press chief, his lineaments by now fully composed, with conspicuous affability invited Köves to take a seat and, while Köves established that he really was wearing a flower in his buttonhole, in point of fact a white carnation, told him that he was delighted to be able to welcome him among his colleagues, which Köves heard with well-founded scepticism. He instructed Köves to see to take whatever steps were necessary to ensure that his personal details were placed on file at the office—the typist would be of assistance there—and there was time enough to assume his new sphere of duties the next day: “We arrange for articles to be reprinted in the press,” he said, and a doleful smile appeared on his face, making Köves think at first that maybe it was the “reprinting” that distressed him, possibly he felt it was unworthy, but he could have been wrong about that, because the press chief’s long, brown, moustachioed face, seemed to carry some secret sorrow which nevertheless, at least in this mute form, sometimes sought to emerge, whereas at other times that smile lurked on it, even as he went on: “But what am I doing explaining all that to you, of all people, when I’ve heard all about your outstanding literary talents?” at which Köves jerked his head up like someone who had been roused suddenly from a long and tranquil dream with some frightening piece of news. “My literary talents?” He grew alarmed. “From who?” he asked. All the press chief said, this time substituting a mysterious smile for the doleful one, was “From our mutual friend; I can’t say more than that …,” yet Köves instantly guessed all the same whom he should suspect.

  “Don’t tell me you’re not pleased about it?” Sziklai laughed out loud, but whether because he wanted to avoid giving a straight answer, or because he was curious about something else, Köves asked instead:

  “So, you know him?”

  “Certainly I know him,” Sziklai replied, his eyebrows raised in amazement, as if surprised at Köves’s ignorance. “All the same …,” he carried on but then broke off what he had to say so as to order two beers, no: “two shots” in celebration of their reunion, from Alice who had hurried up to their table and, for her part, likewise shared their delight, commenting that “We’ve been missing our Mr. Editor badly”—“All the same …,” Sziklai then picked up the thread of their conversation again, “How do you think you got out of the meatgrinder into such a classy job?”

  “How?” Köves inquired curiously, but like someone already harbouring forebodings.

  “By my organising it for you,” Sziklai wised him up.

  “You?!” Köves was astonished. “You mean it wasn’t an arrangement from higher up?” He gave himself away, like a child who, driven by his own curiosity, starts taking a doll apart in order to see what is speaking in its belly; and having got going, he also related to Sziklai how he had been dismissed from the steelworks, and Sziklai laughed so hard that a tiny tear welled up in one eye and lodged, twinkling, in the thicket of wrinkles which had formed at the corner of the eye.

  “An arrangement from higher up!” he choked. “Well of course it was an arrangement from higher up: I arranged it.” He finally calmed down, adding that the press chief was an “old client.” He had already known him during his journalist days, but he had “renewed contact” with him at the fire brigade, he said, at which point Köves asked parenthetically how, now it had come up, Sziklai felt being with the fire brigade, at which Sziklai gave a haughty dismissive wave:

  “Superbly! I have them eating from the palm of my hand.” Now, he went on, the fire brigade was one of the Ministry for Production’s biggest clients, with all its orders for motor vehicles, pipes, fire ladders, helmets, and whatnot, in large quantities, and of course—as tends to be the case—goods at knock-down prices for the most part don’t come up to scratch, and then it was his—Sziklai’s—job, on behalf of the fire brigade, to raise the threat of public exposure, whereas it was the press chief’s job, on behalf of the ministry, to dissuade him from doing that, to reassure him with all sorts of promises, and the two of them generally managed to find ways of coming to terms with each other.

  “If you know what I mean,” Sziklai said, winking meaningfully at Köves.

  “Sure,” Köves retorted hurriedly, so as not to hold Sziklai from telling his story, because his own case was of more interest than any disputes between the fire brigade and the ministry. So anyway, Sziklai continued, during one of their talks it had come to light that a vacancy had arisen in the press chief’s department, and even though filling the position was not exactly of great urgency, still, if Sziklai happened to have a possible candidate in mind, the press chief would of course give serious consideration to offering the job to the person in question, and needless to say, said Sziklai, he had “jumped at the opportunity.”

  “I told you I wouldn’t forget about you, didn’t I? That I’d find something for you without fail!” The one thing he hadn’t known, he anticipated Köves’s next question, was where Köves was to be found, given that he didn’t have his home address:

  “Which is absurd, old friend. Give it to me right away!” at which Köves nodded vigorously as though that was precisely his intention, he was only deferring doing so until later in order not to interrupt Sziklai; and Köves had also forgotten to inform him, Sziklai upbraided him further, where he had gone to work. Now, discovering his place of work was by no means as difficult as Köves no doubt supposed, he went on; he had simply donned his fire officer’s uniform, gone off to the employment office, and enquired whether they had, by any chance, recently placed in employment anywhere an individual by the name of Köves, whom the fire brigade had reason to be interested in, and of course they had immediately been of service. Köves himself, however, Sziklai had not wished to notify for the time being.

  “You were behaving so oddly when I last saw you that I was afraid you were quite capable of standing in the way of your own luck!” Consequently, he had merely given Köves’s name and workplace to the press chief, and the press chief “set the matter on an official footing,” which subsequently, having done the rounds from one department to the next, had eventually arrived at the steelworks in the form of a categorical order from higher up.

  “Do you get it now?” Sziklai asked.

  “Sure,” Köves replied with a thin smile, like someone who admittedly might have been slightly taken in but was nevertheless not entirely oblivious to the funny side of the situation. After which Sziklai once again got Köves to repeat what the head of the shipping department had said, the things about higher conceptualisation, unbroken perfectionism, and putting people to the test, the whole situation as they had sat opposite each other and debated things in all seriousness, when he, Sziklai, and the press c
hief had already talked about and arranged everything ages ago, and having again laughed at the whole thing as if he were hearing it for the first time:

  “You see, old chap, now that’s a true comic situation for you!” his raised index finger drawing, as it were, the abiding lesson for the two of them.

  Literature. Trials and tribulations

  One evening, Köves bumped into Mrs. Weigand, the lady of the house; to be more accurate, as he was about to leave he was standing in the hallway when the woman called out to him from the opened kitchen door to please excuse that morning’s events, though Köves—his hand already on the door handle—could think of nothing offhand which had happened that morning (it had been a hard day at the ministry), but then it came back to him. It had concerned the boy, Peter, of course, or in truth more the fact that nowadays, since he had been working for the ministry, Köves had adopted a number of customs which pointed to being pampered; so, for example, he had taken a fancy—perhaps implanted by the girl—to having a breakfast before leaving the house, and the previous evening he had been in a shop to purchase some tea for this purpose, if not tea consisting of genuine tea, of course, at least not of the type whose fragrance or residual aroma Köves, at the moment of purchase, could almost sense shooting up from the depths of some distant and maybe nonexistent past. In the morning, then, Köves had appeared with the tea in the kitchen: he seemed to have forgotten that he no longer had to get up at daybreak, as when he had been at the steelworks, so he had caught the members of the household in the kitchen just as they were in the middle of their own breakfast, so, mumbling some sort of apology, he was about to withdraw immediately, had indeed already mentally abandoned his plan, as the idea of not breakfasting alone but in company had not figured at all among the fantasies he had woven about breakfast, yet Mrs. Weigand protested so strenuously, invited him so warmly, making space for Köves’s tea on the gas stove, that he could hardly back out without causing offence. In the end, breakfast was consumed in a tense atmosphere. Peter, who had in front of him on the table, a pocket-sized chess table with small holes in the middle of the squares into which fitted the pins of the pieces and, holding a nibbled slice of bread in one hand, moved the chess pieces with the other, only raised his eyes to the others to signal how much of a nuisance they were to him (though even so Köves noticed that behind the thick lenses of the spectacle the boy’s beady eyes were red from strain, or sleeplessness, or possibly both), so that Mrs. Weigand gradually gave up talking, only whispering to offer Köves the sugar and the mud-pie-like bread, and was finally reduced to simply gesticulating behind her son’s back to apologize and indicate her helplessness, to the point that Köves at times felt on the verge of laughing out because it looked almost as if the two of them were the children, with the forbidding and feared head of the family ruling over them with fickle despotism.