Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

  “Yes, the fire brigade,” Köves confirmed.

  “And you still did nothing to consolidate your position,” the girl chided him.

  “What was I supposed to do?” Köves asked, like someone who was finally starting to take some interest in his own affairs, albeit belatedly of course, and therefore not so much with an eagerness to do something about it as out of the idle curiosity of a resigned regret.

  “Open your eyes and find your way around the chain of command!” she girl told him.

  “Is that so?” Köves muttered, as though the idea of doing that dispirited him even in retrospect, even undone. “And what would I have gained by going that?” he inquired nevertheless. For instance, he would have understood the press chief’s novella, the girl answered. He would have known what everyone knew: that a power struggle was going on between the press chief and the minister’s secretary, and also who was the instrument of that rivalry. She would be curious as to whether Köves was aware of that, at least, but of course he wasn’t. Well, it was the highly esteemed current chairman of the Supervisory Committee, and at one and the same time the minister’s secretary’s bitch of a wife, yes, her!—through her each kept a tight grip on the other, they literally clashed with one another over her body. On the surface, of course, the secretary’s position was incomparably the more favourable, both as the woman’s husband and as the minister’s secretary, who could simply stamp the press chief underfoot, pulverize him; but then, on the other hand, and the three of them were well aware of this, he didn’t do that precisely because he could. She could guess what sort of face Köves was pulling in the dark: an ignorant face, because he wouldn’t understand this, his mind worked on different lines—she wasn’t saying that disparagingly, but, quite the contrary, appreciatively, in some respects with outright admiration for Köves’s turn of mind, but it was still true, that’s what power was like, that’s how it operated: if it could not be exercised, then it wasn’t power. Ah! What did Köves know about that sort of thing: nothing, less than nothing! One fine day, for example, the press chief would receive a cold, unmerciful break-up letter from the woman which cruelly trampled in the dust all the feelings they had hitherto professed for each other. He had no clue what had happened; for days he had roved around the office pale as death, incapable of hiding his pain, wincing from the suffering and humiliation, trying to call the woman up, or to get calls put through to her, but not reaching her, finding she was not available, by pleading sickness, maybe not setting foot in the ministry for days on end, until, let’s say a week later, there would be a telephone call, or a letter would arrive, in which, for instance, the woman would inform him that every word of the previous letter had been dictated to her by her husband, the secretary, because he had come across something—a telltale piece of paper had popped up, or some fresh rumour had reached his ear—so, out of dreadful necessity, she had put down what had been dictated purely in order to avert the momentary threat, but with every word she had written she had suffered agonies of pain. Which was all very well, but in the meantime the press chief had been put on the rack: although this was not the first time it had happened—oh, by no means the first, nor even the second—he had nevertheless believed every word of what was in the letter, imagining he had been betrayed, deserted, indeed conspired against, and any moment might find himself struck down by the secretary’s avenging fury; pictured them in the marital bed as, for the sake of their spent love, they wring new stimuli for themselves out of his existence, so to say, and maybe at the climax of their pleasure they vilified his name; indeed—though he could not seriously have believed it, yet there were precedents—he even imagined they would murder him; yes, he had even played with that thought, had voluptuously pictured for himself a scene in which the secretary returned home with bloody hands, confessed to his wife, and the woman merely said: “Thank you.” That was the sort of thing he dreamed up, so it was genuinely painful to see him in such distress, torturing himself. How downcast he looked sometimes, destitute, that one was left not knowing what to do, how to console him, how to pull him round, when … when it was just power, a power game, nothing else. That was how it went, these were its laws; that was what it looked like when it was exercised, and she, the typist, would be mighty curious to know whether the press chief really did love the minister’s secretary’s wife in the way he himself imagined he did, or rather, as she herself, the typist, now thought, as a result of much head-scratching and her ruminations during many a sleepless night, the prey that the woman’s person represented for him. Otherwise what would the woman be worth to him if he did not have to claw her away from the minister’s secretary; and similarly, what would the wife be worth to the minister’s secretary if there was not the constant suspicion, if there were no cases of her being caught red-handed; if he could not order her to heel like a whimpering dog time and time again; and if he could not always use those occasions to give the press chief a kick. As to the woman, what would all this mean to her if she could not feel that she had two men in her power; in other words, all three of them had become so intertwined that they no longer knew who was controlling whom, who was on top and who the underdog, and why they were doing it at all—they were just doing it because they started doing it at one time, and now they were unable to do it any other way …

  That, then, was how things stood, and anyone who did not know that, and was unsuspectingly fooled by appearances, or by the press chief’s words, like … well, like Köves by that novella:

  “No doubt you made some pronouncement about it,” the girl queried, or rather asserted.

  Certainly he had, Köves replied, since the press chief expected that of him; that’s why he had read the story out to him.

  “And what did you say?” the girl wanted to know, and Köves, who no longer recalled much, it seemed, replied that it had been nothing in particular, little more than empty phrases, stock words of praise, like how interesting it was, how original, things like that.

  “Nothing else?” the girl was unconvinced.

  “Oh, yes!” it seemed that Köves now recalled more. “I told him that I considered it to be a symbolic story, but it still showed the mark of a lived personal experience.”

  “There you are,” the girl’s voice was all gentle, comforting triumph. “He must have believed that you knew his secret, and now he has surrendered for good, put himself in your hands for good,” the girl spoke in an almost caressing tone, her hand finding Köves’s face in the dark and stroking it as if he were a little boy. “Oh dear, that’s ignorance for you,” she reproved him.

  “Yes,” said Köves, “it seems that I don’t nurture the same interest in him that you do,” and the hand now stopped on the face, then pulled away, as if by making the remark Köves had withdrawn himself from their joint concerns and joint subjection to step onto a separate path and had thereby possibly offended her.

  “How much you know about him,” he went on, all the same, his voice revealing not surprise so much as almost wonder. “You know him in the way that a person can only know her tormentor,” he added.

  “My tormentor …? Why would something like that occur to you? How dare you say anything like that?” the girl asked indignantly, in that almost injured tone of voice people use who are offended only by the truth.

  “And what if it were the case?” she said later with the liberated, almost scornful confidentiality that, it seemed, their ineffaceable hours of intimacy had precipitated within her. “Should I put up with it? Accept being walked all over, trampled upon?”

  But it was most likely daybreak by the time this took place, when the light seems to bring with it a restoration of the order which will sunder them and soon direct them to their distinct, widely separated places, and they eye each other strangely, almost with hostility, like people who by the sober light of day are counting the cost of a venture predestined to come to nothing—it was something like this that Köves felt, still dazed from the sudden awakening and hurried dressing, while th
e girl stood before him in an immaculate dress, a cloud of fresh scents around her, radiant and cool as (it crossed Köves’s throbbing head) a drawn sword, and urged him to get going, so they did not arrive at the ministry together.

  “You’re horribly ambitious,” he said, or rather complained, as he searched for some final item of discarded clothing, maybe his necktie, maybe his coat. “You’re eaten up by ambition. What do you actually want?” he asked, probably not driven by any curiosity, more simply to occupy the awkward moments until he had finished dressing.

  But the girl must have misunderstood him, because she gave him an answer, overstrung, irascibly, in confidence and scornfully, like before:

  “Him,” she said. “I want him back,” suddenly turning her back on Köves, and he saw her shoulders heaving, followed a moment later by a choking sound that was instantly stifled. Yet when he tried to approach her: “Don’t touch me!” the girl exclaimed, then “Get going, go!” she added in a sudden fit of anger that Köves felt he did not deserve as he had done nothing to upset the girl, or if he had, then it was not deliberate: “Just so you don’t get the idea that I’m going to walk arm in arm with you to the ministry where your notice of dismissal is waiting!”

  “Notice of dismissal?” Köves was astonished, not so much at the news in itself, more at its unexpectedness, startled solely by the setting, the timing, and the occasion. “How do you know?” he asked a little later, and of course he had not the slightest intention of setting off.

  “I typed it yesterday morning.” The girl now turned round to face Köves, her voice milder, a look of almost embarrassed sympathy on her face.

  Köves then soon found himself in a strange stairwell, then on the street, where he pondered for a few seconds which direction he should now take.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Change of direction

  Not much later—it must have been midmorning, getting on for ten o’clock—Köves was standing in another stairwell and pushing once, twice and, finally, a third time on the bell of a battered door, which had no name-plate and had clearly seen better days, until an ill-tempered stirring could be heard from behind it and a bald, oval head, fleshy face, and morose pair of eyes appeared in the peephole, and then a high-pitched, brassy voice resembling a trumpet hooted at him:

  “You?!…” Berg was amazed. A key then jangled, a lock clicked, and Köves found himself in a gloomy space—some sort of hallway it must have been, for one of his shoulders immediately bumped against one of a pair of cumbersome entrance-hall wardrobes of disparate sizes—from which he stepped through an open glazed door into a lighter, somewhat more spacious room. It was an odd room at first glance, and its oddity was not caused by the paler and darker blankets laid on the floor, which obviously served as a carpet, nor even by the two rush-bottomed armchairs and a stool which were fraying around the wooden frames, or the two bed-settees, already sagging like potholes, which were set alongside the middle of the wall, it was more something that was missing: it was only then that Köves saw that might have been meant to be among these things was the table he now spotted in front of a tile stove, which was standing in one of the far corners of the room and on which he could see a decrepit office desk lamp, which was shining even in the light of the morning, sheets of paper, a sharp and a blunt pencil, a red pencil sharpener, as well as a small metal tray, and on it, in single-file as if heading toward the stove, a green, a white, a pink, and a chocolate-coloured petit-four, along with a glass of water, then, in a recess between the table and stove, another rush-bottomed seat without a back—in all probability the one from which Berg had jumped to his feet, when Köves had started ringing at the door.

  “To what do I have to thank for the … How did it come to mind that … How do you know the ring to give?” with great difficulty Berg got out his questions, evidently none too pleased at having to receive a guest.

  “The same way that I knew the address.” Köves smiled tentatively, by way of an apology, as it were.

  “So, you’ve come from the South Seas?” Berg asked.

  “Yes,” Köves nodded, still a little uncertainly, as if he too were surprised by it. There was no denying that although he had started off from the typist’s dwelling with the initial intention of going to the Ministry of Production, if only to pick up his notice of dismissal, he had changed direction en route, it seems, because not long afterwards he found himself sitting in the South Seas and asking Alice to bring a substantial breakfast. One word led to another, and all at once there slipped from Köves’s mouth—due to sleeplessness, the experiences and unordered thoughts that were still whirling confusedly about in his head: in short, inattention—the question which had anyway long been on his mind: “How’s your … partner?” to which Alice had responded that if he was really curious, why didn’t he pay a visit? “Where?” Köves had asked, perhaps less surprised than the surprising suggestion would have justified. “At home,” Alice replied as unaffectedly as though Köves was a close friend who was constantly dropping in on them, and from the look she gave Köves seemed to discern a mute plea. He then recalled that Alice had complained for a long time, relating how Berg had not set foot outside his home for weeks, perhaps months now; and if she did not take home, and set down before him, his lunch and supper he would not eat but just die of hunger; and it was useless her telling him to get out sometimes, come down to the café, see something else than the four bare walls—all her talking was to no avail, for it was hard to get even a word out of him; he was more and more wrapped up in his thoughts. “About what?” Köves asked. “His work,” the waitress answered evasively and with a touch of uncomprehending nervousness over an activity somewhat alien to her, which on the spur of the moment put Köves in mind of Mrs. Weigand’s agitation in the way she was used to complaining about her son. To his dubious question as to what she was expecting him to achieve with a visit, all the waitress was able to say, with an unsure smile of unclear hope, was, “What a nice chat he had with you the other day …,” but still, he was there after all.

  “People are worried about you,” he said, perhaps partly by way of explanation, with the hint of a smile, as if being simply the faithful bearer of that concern, but also with the required solemnity of one who was thereby fulfilling his mission.