Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

  “My room’s not far from here,” Köves spoke almost morosely.

  “Then let’s go to my place, I have a whole apartment,” the typist responded in roughly the same tone that Köves had so often heard her using on the telephone on office business.

  Once the door had closed behind them, however, they had only just enough time to swiftly get out of their clothes, but not to make the bed as well: they sank onto the gaudy, threadbare carpet, snatching, tumbling about, panting, moaning, as though all they had been doing for centuries, no, millennia, was wait, wait and endure, oppressed and, even under the blows which battered body and soul, concealing within themselves, secretly and as it were slyly, a hope, however preposterous, that their torments would one day, just once, be obliterated by rapture, or if it came to that, that all their torments would one day melt into rapture, from which they would groan just as they had from their torments, for throughout their lives all they had ever learned, ever at all, was to groan.

  As a result, in respect of the whole day and the night that later greeted them, Köves precisely recalled certain words, moods, touches, and various situations, but much less their sequence and connections.

  “What actually happened between the two of you?” the girl asked, but whether that was in the office, in the street, or in bed, Köves couldn’t say, because later on they did, after all, let the sofa down and got into bed in the slowly gathering twilight, as into a castle moat or a ship’s cushioned casemate, perfectly safe from the outside world, and flinging their intertwining bodies about over and over again were nevertheless able to get even for the ill treatment they had suffered. “Did he take you into his confidence? Let you in on his secrets?”

  “What secrets?” Köves asked.

  “That’s his way,” the girl said. “First he pours his soul out to you, then he murders you …”

  “All he did with me is read out a short story,” Köves protested.

  “What was it about?”

  “It was nonsense. I couldn’t even tell you if I tried,” Köves shrugged his shoulders.

  “Try,” the girl implored, so Köves did try, though it wasn’t easy, of course, because at the time he had not paid sufficient attention, and so now he was unable to remember much; what he was able to sketch most vividly, to the girl’s great amusement, in which Köves fancied that he could detect some hints of impatience, almost of deterrence, if he was not mistaken, was his own alarm when, on the afternoon of the previous day, he was summoned by the press chief into his room on a matter that Köves had no doubts about for even a second and yet, instead of the usual folded sheet of paper, had this time pulled a whole bundle from his desk drawer.

  “I’ve written a short story,” he announced to Köves with a modest yet somewhat defiant smile.

  “Oh good! A short story!” Köves enthused (in reality, of course, he was aghast).

  “Perhaps,” the press chief amended his previous words with a somewhat meditative expression, “I might better call it a ballad, a prose ballad.”

  Köves then related to the girl how the press chief had put on the eyeglasses that he rarely used, set them straight on his nose, pulled down with a few vigorous wriggles of his outstretched arms the cuffs of his shirtsleeves, which, it seems, had ridden up, smoothed the sheets of paper, cast another scrutinising glance at Köves, cleared his throat, then finally launched into reading out in an oily, sentimental voice, while he, Köves, who had by then acquired sufficient practice as to how to adopt the role of attentive listener, settled down with his elbows placed on the chair’s armrests, the palm of one hand cupping his chin and over his mouth (thus allowing him to discreetly cover any yawns that welled up), and was mainly preoccupied with weighing up the quantity of sheets of paper lying in front of the press chief and meanwhile thinking uneasily about the promise made to Sziklai to meet up that evening at the South Seas at an earlier time than usual. He had consequently abjectly failed to catch the title of the short story, and likewise its opening lines: all he remembered was a fogginess about when the story took place, the total absurdity of its location, and the antiquated, tortuous, indeed (or so Köves considered) defective language of the tale. In short, it was about the press chief, or rather not the press chief, not a bit of it: the protagonist of the story, a “Wanderer” of some sort (Köves tried to call him to mind) who was roaming around a desert of some kind and all at once arrives at a tower of some kind (as to why precisely a tower, or what sort of tower, the typist should not ask, because that never became clear, Köves explained), and in the tower he spies a marvellous woman (come to think of it, it was more than likely the woman’s singing which had drawn him to the tower in the first place, it occurred to Köves), who now came down to him and led him into her garden, though of course no indication had been given that a garden was to be found there at all. That was then followed by a lavish, one might even say lush, description of the garden, Köves retailed, the lawn with its bushes, the mirror-smooth little lake, the fragrant, carmine, fleshy-petalled blossoms which thirstily imbibed the dew-drops quivering on them, not to speak of a fountain which boldly shot up its jets on high. Anyway, he carried on, while the woman is leading him along these paths, the press chief, or Wanderer (though Köves could only ever imagine the latter amidst the garden scenery in the form of the diminutive, immaculately dressed press chief in some outrageous costume), notices that the woman has heavy shackles on her hands and feet. He remarks on it, promising the woman that he will secure her release from them, but all the woman responds, oddly and brusquely, is: “I like the shackles.” Then they sit down somewhere, at the foot of some tropical plant (sadly, on the spur of the moment, Köves was unable to recall its splendid, resounding name: maybe a magnolia, though possibly a eucalyptus), the moon rises, and in its light the press chief notices weals, scars, and signs of whiplashing on the woman’s shoulders and breasts (quite why was unclear but, somehow or other, the woman had disrobed, it seems). “Do you like being whipped?” the press chief asks the woman, but this time she remains silent and merely looks at him enigmatically with deep, dark eyes “like the water of nocturnal wells,” Köves recited. The press chief is then overcome by a disagreeable presentiment, except that by now a sense of compassion, to use a mild and by no means accurate word for it, has been awakened in him, and this has stifled more sober considerations, so that he starts to kiss the woman’s wounds, and she, in an enigmatic manner, stands up, takes the press chief by the hand, leads him back to the foot of the tower and there, on the moonlit lawn, submits to his passion. At this point there ensued certain details (Köves inferred that, rather than the expected fulfilment, the press chief, or rather Wanderer, had experienced some sense of let down, as if he had found the woman’s ardour too little: grim light was soon to be thrown on this, as well as his presentiments. Because a horrifying cry resounds, and a strapping, sinister man in black appears in the doorway to the tower, a cat-o’-nine-tails in his hand—the man of the house and the woman’s husband, who in all probability has seen everything from one of the tower’s windows. There now followed painful scenes of betrayal, cruelty, and fornication, Köves warned the girl, with misgivings that he jokingly exaggerated somewhat. The man of the house “sets his servants and hounds loose” on the press chief. The woman pleads for mercy, first for the two of them but, as the man raises the lash on her, forgetting the press chief, for herself alone, at which the man pulls the woman up and clasps her to his chest. The press chief, who in the meantime has been struggling with “the servants and hounds,” now catches the woman’s glance, reading compassion from it and something else: “stolen rapture”. His strength then fails him, and he yields to “the servants and hounds”. He possibly even dies, or at least the woman and the man suppose so. Nevertheless, he can still see and hear. He sees the woman’s smile, the gesture her hand makes as she strokes the muscles of the man’s arm and chest, even his lash, and he hears her voice as she extols the man’s strength, and he sees the man eyeing with grim delight
the press chief’s corpse and his living wife. The woman, for her part, elatedly returns the man’s gaze. The sinister couple now sink to the ground and try to make love on the lawn, glimmering in the silver of the moonlight, right next to the press chief’s corpse. The man might have triumphed, but to no avail; the woman tries out in vain all the tricks and secrets of love that she has just learned from the press chief, so in the end they clamber to their feet on the turf and stand there, broken and overwhelmed with shame, tears glistening in their eyes. “Not even now?…,” the woman asks gently. “Not even now,” the man replies, his head lowered. In despair and anger, he is about to grasp the lash again, but the woman knocks it from his hand with a single blow. She takes the shackles off herself and uses them to fetter the man. The woman, indeed, goes further by attaching smaller chains to the man’s nose, lips, and ears, with the man submissively, mutely enduring all this as though he had been vanquished. Taking the chains in her hands, the woman then leads the man into the house and up the tower, and the mortally prostrate press chief hears the rattle of irons from up above, from the man’s window—presumably he has been chained to the wall.

  At this point, having spoken ever more haltingly for a while, Köves fell silent for good, it seemed, indeed for a moment he might even have dozed off, because he started up at the sound of the girl’s insistent:

  “And then …?” to which Köves replied that that was essentially the end of the story. The man was clapped in irons, the woman goes up the tower again, and the press chief hears her striking into song again: Ah! So this woman never sleeps, he thinks in horror, quickening his steps, for in the meantime he has somehow pulled himself together and, evading the vigilance of servants and hounds, made good his escape, and with his “lacerated wounds” he is now moving around outside anew, in the desert maybe, but free at last.

  “Free!” the typist’s unexpected, unduly shrill exclamation brought Köves round, almost making him jump. “The wretch!… He’ll never be free,” she added bitterly, leaving Köves, who felt his reason was beginning to slip away again (his exhausted, contentedly tingling senses demanded a break, sleep, a deep, unconscious dreaming, as if he were inebriated) and, offhand, maybe could not even have said whether it was still the dying evening or already the first glimmer of daybreak which was shimmering in the window, asked with a thick tongue:

  “Of what? And who won’t?”

  “Do you really know nothing?” the typist asked, and it really did seem that Köves knew nothing, nothing at all. “The current chairman of the Supervisory Committee!… The bitch!…,” the typist’s voice shrilled like an alarm at night, and Köves felt a warm, moist touch from the girl’s face on his fingers—in the dark she seemed to have buried her brow and tear-filled eyes for a second in Köves’s hand, but then she immediately snatched it up with an impetuous movement, as if she were seeking to throw far away the pain burrowing within it, shaking her head several times, making her swirling hair swish silkily, fragrantly, on Köves’s shoulder too.

  “How long have you been working at our place?” she said, her voice still choking, like someone swallowing her tears, “and you still go around as if you had nothing to do with us, as if you were a foreigner: that’s what the boss was saying this morning, and I’m saying it too.”

  “I can’t help it,” Köves muttered. And like someone whose tongue is loosened by approaching sleep or some other stupor, he added with uninhibited, cheerful determination: “None of you were of any interest.”

  “I can believe that. There isn’t anything interesting about us,” he heard the girl’s quiet, bitter voice, and although she was now—it seemed like a long, long time already—lying wordlessly, stiffly beside him, Köves, even if he did not come completely to, also did not fall asleep; instead, on some unconscious compulsion, he moved and stretched out his hand questingly until the palm was caressing the at first bristling, but then ever-less-resisting, ever-more-melting female skin, and as if the warmth of the caressing fingers were also loosening her throat, the girl started talking quietly:

  “The current chairman of the Supervisory Committee … you’d think, wouldn’t you, that was just one of those temporary titles, lasting only until it’s somebody else’s turn: that’s what you’d suppose from the name, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed,” Köves agreed, even nodded, though probably pointlessly as it was dark and the girl wouldn’t have been able to see it.

  “Well, it isn’t!” the girl cried out, as it were rebutting Köves’s assertion in a sharp tone of triumph. “Not a bit of it! She is permanently the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee; by pure chance she is always the current one, her, her, and no-one else, it’s been going on like that for years, and it will go on like that for still more years!… Who is going to dare stand up to her husband?”

  “Why? Who’s that?” Köves asked, more due to the pause that had ensued, which seemed to be demanding his voice, confirmation of his presence, rather than out of any genuine curiosity.

  “The minister’s secretary,” the girl retorted with the same bitterness as before, though this time it carried a near-exultant ring of delight at being well informed.

  “You mean there’s a minister?” Köves marvelled, but here it seemed the girl was almost angry at him:

  “You can’t seriously be asking that,” she said, “when there’s a photograph of him hanging in every room, including ours, and right above your head at that.” Köves did, of course, remember the photographs perfectly well, though on the other hand, perhaps precisely because he had seen so many of them, he remembered the face itself only vaguely, like the sort of faces one recalls because they fleetingly pass before one’s eyes in specific places, at specific times, time and time again, but never recalling them for themselves, merely for those specific places and specific times, so he sensed that the girl had misunderstood his question, though as to what sort of doubts he wished to express thereby, maybe he himself had already forgotten, and therefore in order to preserve his authority all the same, he merely remarked:

  “That’s not in itself proof he exists.”

  “Oh,” the girl mocked, “so you’re an unbeliever! You need proofs, because if you aren’t suspicious, you feel stupid, and perhaps you even brag about your lack of faith, but meanwhile you have no idea about the real world, no idea about anything!”

  With that dressing-down, Köves clammed up, and he listened without saying a word to the girl’s easy-flowing voice and fluent words as to the simultaneously refreshing and soporific patter of warm rain.

  The minister—he existed all right, he was all too real! And even more real was his power, power in general. A ramifying thread which interwove everything and twitched everyone to do its bidding. There might be some individuals whom he did not reach, or who even did not see him—Köves for one, who therefore did not have the foggiest idea about him. And not through any stupidity: the girl had been watching Köves for a while and was convinced that he was not at all stupid. But then what could Köves be after? she had fretted, and she confessed that, to this day, she did not know. It was valid to ask, of course, whether it was possible to live like that, at least over a protracted period—outside the circle, that is. One thing for sure was that he was not going to get very far in life, though perhaps he would manage to preserve his intellectual independence, and at this point, after some groping in the dark, the typist squeezed her fingers over Köves’s lips as though she had concluded from his breathing that he was about to fly into a rage on account of her scathing words. Because, she continued, undeniably there was also something appealing about that independence: Was any further proof needed than the fact that Köves was in her bed right now? Of course not. Köves probably had not the slightest idea how weak, how vulnerable, how exposed, how defenceless he was. That morning, when “the humiliation occurred”—that, by the way, was bound to happen sooner or later, everyone knew that, everyone was waiting for it except Köves, of course—well anyway, that morning when all that
happened in the end was what was bound to happen, she had nevertheless felt real pain, yes, literally physical pain, a sickly feeling, and, strange as it may sound, that sickness had told her what in fact she thought about him.

  “And what would that be?” Köves asked, in a sharp, sarcastic tone, as though he were protesting not so much at what the girl was thinking about him but the very fact that the girl should be thinking about him; and the girl answered only after a pause, as if she had needed to wait until the hostility in Köves’s voice had died away everywhere, even in the room’s farthest recesses.

  “That you are innocent,” she said.

  “What do you mean?!” Köves rejoined promptly. “You think that someone who has committed no crime is automatically innocent?”

  “Not at all,” the girl replied. “The way you live is already a big enough crime: your innocence is the same as a child’s—it’s ignorance,” and this time Köves maintained a silence, as if he were searching for counter-arguments, but so long was it taking that in itself it threw doubt on any refutation. Köves was not even aware, the girl continued, that his situation … and here she hesitated as if she were trying to find the appropriate words with which to alert Köves to his situation: his situation was the most precarious, the most fragile, in the department, he being the only person who was completely dispensable. The press chief, she enumerated, was indispensable, not just because he was the boss but because he was the minister’s speechwriter; it would not surprise her if Köves was unaware of even that. You see, she chortled, of course he was unaware. He might not even have heard the minister speaking as yet, might even be unaware that the minister occasionally gave speeches. Well then, it was actually the minister’s secretary who was supposed to write the minister’s speeches; however, he got the press chief to write them for him. Even if no one actually said it in so many words, that was basically the reason for maintaining the press office, even if there was also a certain amount of work with the press—but then the senior staffer took care of that. That was why he, too, was indispensable, because, to be honest, Köves did not do much to make the senior staffer dispensable. As far as she was concerned, every department always had need of a typist, though it was just the post that was indispensable, not herself personally, and she had no doubt that “some people would be glad to get rid of me,” she wouldn’t go into the reasons for that now, if … well, if it didn’t happen that it was actually she who wrote the minister’s speeches. She realized that Köves would now be pulling an incredulous face in the dark, but he should believe her that it didn’t call for any wizardry; the minister’s speeches were always constructed after the same pattern, one only had to recognize the pattern, though anyone was capable of that: it was pretty much like filling in empty boxes in a printed form. A speech was still a long way from being ready with just that, of course; the typist merely produced the “initial draft,” or in other words “collected, arranged, and outlined the material,” which she would then submit to the press chief, who would make his comments, then on the basis of those comments, she would reword the draft and again hand it over to the press chief, who would make any corrections that were seen as still necessary in his own hand and pass this on to the minister’s secretary. He, in turn, would read the whole thing through, likewise make comments and give it back to the press chief, the press chief back to the secretary, and the secretary now to the minister, who would make his own comments, give it back to his secretary, the secretary to the press chief, and he possibly again to her, after which it would again go on its way up the chain, possibly getting stuck for a longer or shorter interval, oscillating back and forth between secretary and press chief like a trembling compass needle, before finally reaching the minister, and it was possible that it would then be set off once more down, then again up … at this juncture the girl laughed out, in a deep, hoarse tone, as if she had never before dared to see the operation in the light in which she was now seeing it, in the dark: the purposeless and ridiculous shuttling up and down the official hierarchy, which the next day she would again be seeing in the colours of unrelenting seriousness, because that was how she had to see it; indeed, wished to see it: in just the same way as she would arise from a bed disordered by lovemaking to put on her clothes, another face, the inviolable armour of the secretary—and at this her naked body touched Köves’s, as if this fundamental insight had awakened in her a sensual desire that she had to quench rapidly, with rapid breathing. In short, she picked up later on, the department’s work was completely attended to by the three of them. Köves had only been taken on because there had been a need to do a quick favour for someone—the fire brigade, perhaps, as best she could recall.