Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

  This elation, this state of readiness which couldn’t make its mind up what to be ready for, and therefore probably magnified every tiny thing inordinately, may well have caused Köves, all at once, to hear the tramp of marching feet in the corridor. Tens or hundreds of thousands, or millions?—Köves could not have said. In reality, of course, it was just one person, and not near at hand but in the longer limb of the L-shaped corridor, which Köves could not see into from where he was—clearly an official who had clearly stepped out of his room and was now clearly hurrying to another room, his footsteps echoing in the narrow corridor, and Köves was no doubt perfectly aware that this was the case, it was just that his present mood simply would not tolerate him taking into account such trivial and dreary facts. He merely sensed something: the vortex of those echoing steps, the pull of the marching—this truly made him dizzy, enticed him, induced him to join, dragging him off into the flood, the ranks of the unstoppable procession. Yes, out into the multitude, because Köves now did not just hear the tread of a single official as the tread of many, he could almost picture the multitude as well: warmth, security, the irresistible, blind tide of incessant footsteps and the twilight happiness of eternal forgetting were waiting for Köves—not for a second was he in doubt about that. At that very second, though, he also saw something else in the corridor: a vague apparition which resembled the drowning man haunting his dreams. Of course, he only saw the drowning man in the way that he did the multitude; in other words, not at all, yet meanwhile feeling that he saw it better than if he actually saw it: it was his uniqueness which was writhing there, his abandoned, ownerless life. At that moment, Köves sensed, with almost piercing clarity, that his time there had come to an end and had simultaneously been accomplished: whether to make the jump or not, he had to choose—indeed, with an obscure sense of relief, he felt he no longer even had to choose. He was going to make the jump simply because he could do nothing else; make the jump even though he knew it would be a fateful jump, that the drowning man was going to carry him along, and who could know how long they would have to struggle in the depths, and who could know whether he would ever be able to find his way up into the light again?

  How long he stood there in the corridor, and how long he experienced the strange and evidently destined to be far from transient mood which overcame him like a sudden shock from the outside, as it were—Köves would have been hard put to keep an eye on, to be sure. The fact is, the footsteps which had induced this almost feverish state of stunned elation had not even died away when the door opened and he was called for, and Köves went in and behaved as though he were Köves, the newspaper correspondent, who was interested in nothing else but why the trains were running late, looked at charts, listened to explanations and, who knows, maybe even posed a few questions of his own, nodded, smiled, shook hands, took his leave—none of this disturbed him in the least, did not even impinge on him, as if it were not happening to him, or rather exactly as if it were happening to him alone since—he realized all at once, as he raced down the stairs and stepped out onto the street—it was precisely in this respect that some irrevocable volte-face had happened to him: everything which had happened and was happening had happened and was happening to him and could no longer happen to him without the incisive consciousness of this presence. He may still have been living, but he had virtually lived his life already, and all at once Köves glimpsed that life in the form of such a closed, complete, rounded story that he himself was lost in wonder at its foreignness. And if it was hope that this spectacle elicited from him, that could have pertained only to this story; Köves could only hope that if he personally was beyond saving, his story could still be saved. How could he have imagined he could hide away, detach himself from the gravity of his life like a stray animal from its chain? No, this was how he would have to live from now on, with his gaze riveted on this existence, and to watch for a long time, fixedly, wonderingly, and incredulously, watching on and on, until he finally spotted something in it which very nearly no longer belonged to this life; something which was palpable, confined to the essential, incontestable, and accomplished, like a catastrophe; something which would gradually become detached from this life, like a frost crystal that anyone can pick up and gaze at its final configurations, then pass on to other hands for inspection as one of Nature’s marvellous formations …

  That was how Köves roved the streets, now dawdling, now breaking into a dash, aimlessly and yet, most likely, setting himself an aim as he was going, and of course he noticed that he was sometimes stumbling into obstacles, having to make his way round people, whole groups of people, there being many out on the streets and making quite a racket; he even saw a march, this time a genuine one, with the slogan WE WANT TO LIVE! on the banners raised on high amid the ranks of the marchers, and Köves felt a brief sense of cheerful, absent-minded advocacy at the sight, in the same way that he advocated sunlight, for example, even if his solitary occupation, of course, gave him little chance to devote particularly close attention to it. It was probably getting late, though it was still daylight when he turned into the street on which he lived, and he seemed to hear his name being called out among the other cries, though he started only when someone plucked at his arm: it was Sziklai, who, it became clear, had just dropped in to see Köves and had even left a note for him with his landlady, then he had stuck around for a while longer, running up and down the road, and had just decided not to wait a moment longer when who should he at last happened to see but Köves.

  “Old chap!” he exclaimed, evidently extremely excited, his hard, olive-tinted face, and the sharp lines etched into it looking like a veritable wood carving, “Get your things together. We’ll be coming for you tonight with a truck!”

  “What sort of truck?” Köves asked in a daze, as if he were not entirely sure that it was he who was being spoken to, and whose arm had been grabbed, and whether the person who was nevertheless being spoken to and whose arm had been grabbed really was himself. In the end, on tenterhooks and annoyed as he was, and laughing nervously at Köves’s amazement, Sziklai was obliged to tell him what had happened: the whole city had been stood on its ears, the fire brigade had been disbanded, the soldiers had gone home, the South Seas had closed, the borders were rumoured not to be guarded by anyone, and a group of people—including Sziklai—who had been waiting long, long years, knowingly or not, for a chance to escape from this city, which denied all hope, this life which belied all hope, had now got together and rustled up a truck, on which they would be setting off under the cover of the night, taking Köves with them.

  “Where to?” Köves asked, at a loss to understand, and Sziklai came to an irritated standstill, having meanwhile set off almost at a run, and although he had little idea where he was going Köves more or less mechanically tagged along with him.

  “Does it matter?” Sziklai fumed. “Anywhere!…” He set off again. “Abroad,” he added, and in Köves’s ear the word, at that instant, sounded like a festive peal of bells.

  He walked on for a while without a word, head sunk in thought, by Sziklai’s side.

  “Sorry, but I can’t go,” he said eventually.

  “Why not?” Sziklai again came to a stop, astonishment written all over his face. “Don’t you want to be free?” he asked.

  “Of course I do,” said Köves. “The only trouble is,” he broke into a smile, as if by way of an apology, “I have to write a novel.”

  “A novel?!” Sziklai was dumbstruck. “Now of all times?… You can write it later, somewhere else,” he went on. Köves continued smiling awkwardly:

  “Yes, but this is the only language I know,” he worried.

  “You’ll learn another one,” Sziklai said, waving that aside, almost tapping his feet in impatience: it looked as though other urgent matters were calling him.

  “By the time I learn one I’ll have forgotten my novel.”

  “Then you’ll write another one.” Sziklai’s voice by now sounded almost irritated, and i
t was more for the record than in hope of being understood that Köves pointed out:

  “I can only write the one novel it is given me to write,” for which Sziklai could no longer come up with, and maybe did not even look for, a counterargument. They stood wordlessly, facing each other in the street, a storm of shouts of “We want to live!” around them, then—was it Sziklai who made the first move, or perhaps Köves?—swiftly embraced. Sziklai was then swallowed up in the crowd, whereas Köves turned on his heels and set off back, at a shambling pace, like someone who is in no hurry as he already suspects in advance all the pain and shame his future holds for him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  We reach the end

  though there is no end, because—as we know—nothing ever comes to an end: one has to carry on, onwards and onwards, confidentially, and with nauseating volubility, the way two murderers chat together. Even though what we have to say is as drably objective as murder is psychologically simplified to another statistic which is just as superfluous as, let’s say, the fact that years wore on and Köves did write his novel. He had it fair-typed too, and submitted, like a petition, to a publishing house. One fine day, the postman delivered a bulky package, and just from the feel of it Köves instantly recognized that it was his novel. Ripping it open, he found a letter appended to the manuscript bundle: it informed him in a few frosty lines that his novel had been considered unsuitable for publication.

  Köves becomes of interest to us once more, and not for long either, at that moment, like a descent on a precipitous slope which plunges into darkness, in that caesura of his life. He is still standing there in the hall, novel in hand, an aggrieved but all-suspecting smile on his face: it is a grimace he usually maintains for destiny. He probably imagines that a severe, maybe irreparable blow has befallen him. For a short while, before resolving to step onto his downward path, to take a breather as it were, he draws back into his fiasco like a sick eagle to its nest, its wing broken but still with a sharp enough gaze to be able to scan the ravaged domain of truths and self-justifications for prey. Finally, the hour strikes, so to say, and he has to go. If he keep his eyes open, by the side of the road, he will, for all that, spot a few usable flowers which, even if they do not, of course, compete with edelweiss, he can nevertheless certainly pluck for himself. He tries to decide, first and foremost, whether the publisher might be right: Has he written a good or a bad book? He quickly realizes that from his own point of view (and it may be that it is faulty, but it is the only point of view from which he can look at the world), it’s all the same if he personally considers that the book was exactly what it could have been. Because, even more important than the novel itself, he comes to realize—and this realisation, to be sure, comes as an unexpected surprise—was what had been lived through by his writing about it. That was a choice and a struggle, and precisely the kind of struggle that had been given to him. Freedom had set against himself and his fate, strength had drawn from the circumstances, an assault which subverted necessity—what else was a work, every human work, if not that?…

  The rest? A happy end is in store: by the time he gets to the bottom of the slough he will learn that they have decided to publish his book after all. He will then be pierced by a painful longing, and with the sorrow of nostalgia he will insatiably taste the sweet memory of his fiasco; the time when he lived a living life, when he was consumed by passion and nourished by a secret hope that a future old boy, standing before a filing cabinet and thinking, will no longer be able to share. His unique adventure, his heroic age, will have come to an end once and for all. He had changed his person into an object, diluted his stubborn secret into generality, distilled his unutterable reality into signs. What was for him the only possible novel will become a book among other books, which shares the mass fate of all books, waiting for the chance that the glance of a rare customer may fall on it. His life will become the life of a writer who goes on writing books until he has picked himself completely clean to leave nothing but bare bones, freed of all excess frippery. One must imagine Sisyphus happy, the tale runs. Most assuredly. Yet he too is threatened by grace. True, Sisyphus (and labour service) is timeless, but his stone is not immortal. On its bumpy path, through being rolled so many times, in the end it wears down and, all of a sudden, it occurs to Sisyphus that for a long, long time, whistling to himself as he is lost in thought, he has been kicking a grey lump of stone before him in the dust.

  What is he supposed to do about that? Obviously, he bends down to pick it up, thrusts it into his pocket, and takes it home—it’s his, after all. In his empty hours (and now there are only empty hours in store) he will undoubtedly take it out from time to time. It would be ridiculous, of course, for him to buckle to rolling it uphill, onto the heights of the peaks, but with his senile, cataract-dimmed eyes he contemplates it as if he were still pondering the weight, the grip. He curls his shaking, numb fingers round it, and no doubt he will be clutching it still in the final, the very last moment, when he slumps down, lifeless, from the seat facing the filing cabinet.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  IMRE KERTÉSZ was born in Budapest in 1929. At the age of fourteen he was imprisoned at Auschwitz and later at the Buchenwald concentration camps. Upon liberation in 1945 he worked as a journalist before being fired for not adhering to Communist party doctrine. After a brief service in the Hungarian Army, he devoted himself to writing, although as a dissident he was forced to live under Spartan circumstances. Nonetheless he stayed in Hungary after the failed 1956 uprising, continuing to write plays and fiction in near-anonymity and supporting himself by translating from the German writers such as Joseph Roth, Freud, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. He remained little-known until 1975, when he published his first book, Fatelesseness, a novel about a teenage boy sent to a concentration camp. It became the first book of a trilogy that eventually included Fiasco and Kaddish for an Unborn Child. Subsequent titles include Liquidation, Union Jack, and The Pathseeker. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002 for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” He lives in Berlin.

  TIM WILKINSON is the primary English translator of Imre Kertész (his titles include Liquidation, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, The Pathseeker, and The Union Jack) as well as numerous other significant works of Hungarian literature. His translation of Kertész’s Fatelessness was awarded the PEN Club Translation Prize.