Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

  “Apart from which,” the old boy’s wife added, “blood is being spilt over the shift rota.”

  The point was that the old boy’s wife always worked the morning shift.

  The bistro, on the other hand, stayed open until late at night (during which late-night hours the bistro was frequented by an army of customers who, by the late evening hours, were transformed into exceptionally generous, open-handed beings).

  In accordance with the worthy, fair-play rule of equal opportunity, which was also enshrined in law as a labour right, the bistro’s employees shared alike the clientele for the lunch menu in the mornings and afternoons (pap-eaters in the jargon), as tight-fisted as their time was rushed, and the late-night clientele who, by the late evening hours, were transformed into exceptionally generous, open-handed beings.

  Nevertheless, the old boy’s wife, at her own request, as confirmed by signature, only ever worked in the mornings (so that the old boy would also be able to work in the twenty-eight square metres during the mornings) (and also because she could not abide the late-night clientele who, by the late evening hours, were transformed into exceptionally generous, open-handed beings but at the same time mostly drank themselves stupid or to the point of causing a nuisance).

  Thus the late-night shift hours (as well as the by no means inconsiderable benefits that went with them) to which the old boy’s wife would have been entitled on the worthy, fair-play rule of equal opportunity, which was also enshrined in law as a labour right, were almost automatically assigned to a certain colleague called Mrs. Boda; however, most likely as a result of long habitude and also, perhaps, the greater inclination that human nature shows toward what, no doubt, is—if we may put it this way—a more instinctive attitude to legal practice than the worthy rules of fair play (even when also enshrined in law as a labour right), this certain colleague called Mrs. Boda (whose first name was Ilona) had already long regarded the benefits that had been assigned to her not as assigned benefits but entitlements.

  One must take all that into account in imagining the effect produced by the announcement made by the old boy’s wife that very day that from now on she too wanted to work in the evenings.

  “Why?” the old boy asked.

  “Because as things are I hardly earn anything, and now you are not going to earn anything because you have to write a book.”

  “That’s true,” said the old boy.

  That evening the old boy declared, “I’m off for a walk.”

  “Don’t be too long,” said his wife.

  “All right. I need to think a bit.”

  “There was something else I meant to tell you.”

  “What was that?” The old boy paused.

  “It’s slipped my mind for the moment.”

  “Next time write it down so you won’t forget.”

  “It would be nice if we could go away somewhere.”

  “Yes, that would be nice,” the old boy said, nodding.

  On returning from his walk (his contemplative walk, as he called it), the old boy asked:

  “Did anyone call?”

  “Who would have called?”

  “True,” the old boy conceded.

  “That tin-eared, clap-ridden, belly-dancing bitch of a whore …” the old boy intoned, unhurriedly and syllable by syllable, while carefully shaping the softened wad between his fingers as he crammed it into his ear, thereby placing himself beyond reach of Oglütz, the Slough of Deceit—the entire world in effect.

  … Yes, if I had been consistent I might never have finished my novel. But now I had finished it none the less, and it was inconsistent of me to be surprised that it stood ready. But that was how it was. I’m not suggesting I was unaware that, if I were to write a novel, then sooner or later a novel would come out of that, since over long years I had striven for nothing else than that. So as far as being aware is concerned, it’s not a question of my being unaware; it’s just that I forgot to prepare myself for it. I was too preoccupied with writing the novel to reckon on the consequences. So there it lay before me, more than two hundred and fifty pages, and this pile, this object, was now demanding certain actions on my part. I had no idea how to get a novel published; I was totally unfamiliar with the business, I knew nobody; as yet no prose work of mine, as it is customary to call it, had been published. First of all, I had to get it typed, then I stuffed it into the one and only press-stud file I possessed, which I had acquired by not altogether innocent means during a visit to my mother at the head office of the export company where the old lady supplemented her pension by doing shorthand and typewriting for four hours a day. Then, with the file under my arm, I called on a publisher I knew was in the business of publishing novels by, as it was phrased, contemporary Hungarian authors, among others. I knocked on a door marked Secretariat and enquired of one of the ladies working there, who emanated that mysterious, so hard to define aura of being in charge, whether I might leave a novel with her. On her giving a positive response, I handed the file over to her and watched her place it among a stack of other files on a table at the back of the room. After that I made my way straight to the open-air swimming pool …

  “My God!” exclaimed the old boy.

  … straight to the open-air swimming pool, as I hoped—and was not disappointed—that the weather, being sunny but cool and windy, would deter the crowds from flocking to the pools that day, and I swam a twenty lengths with long, leisurely strokes in the cold water.”

  “My God!” exclaimed the old boy.

  Subsequently, a good two months later, I was sitting with a chap who was something or other at the publisher’s. I had already paid a visit on him a week previously since, according to the lady in the secretariat, “he will answer any enquires about your novel.” As it turned out, he had heard neither about me nor about my novel.

  “When did you submit it?,” he asked.

  “Two months ago.”

  “Two months is not so long,” he assured me. The chap was grey-faced, with a gaunt, harassed, neurotic look about him, and silvered sunglasses. On his desk there were piles of paper, books, an appointment diary, a typewriter, a manuscript bundle covered with scribbled corrections—manifestly a novel. I fled. For preference I would have gone straight to the open-air swimming pool …

  “My God!” exclaimed the old boy.

  … but now that it was the height of the heat wave I had no hope of being able to have a swim.

  On the next occasion he showed himself to be more talkative. By now he had heard both about me and about my novel, though he personally had still not read it. He offered me a seat. Fascism, (he turned toward me and away from his typewriter, in which I could see he had inserted a sheet of the firm’s headed letter paper) was a huge and ghastly subject about which there had already …

  “Aha!” the old boy exclaimed aloud as he started to rummage agitatedly in the file until he spotted a sheet of headed letter paper among his papers.

  It was an ordinary, neat business letter, with fields for date (27/JUL/1973), correspondent (unfilled), subject (unspecified), reference number (482/73), and no greeting:

  “Your manuscript has been assessed by our firm’s readers,” the old boy started to read.

  On the basis of their unanimous opinion … We consider that your way of giving artistic expression to the material of your experiences does not come off, while the subject itself is horrific and shocking. The fact that it nevertheless fails to become … the main protagonist’s, to put it mildly, odd reactions … While we find it understandable that the adolescent main protagonist does not immediately grasp what is happening around him (the call-up for forced labour, compulsory wearing of the yellow star, etc.), we think it inexplicable why, on arrival at the concentration camp, he sees … More passages in bad taste follow … It is also incredible that the spectacle of the crematoria evokes in him feelings of …“a kind of student jape,” as he knows he is in an extermination camp, and his being Jewish is sufficient reason for him to be killed. Hi
s behaviour, his gauche comments … annoyed … the novel’s ending, since the behaviour the main protagonist has displayed hitherto … gives him no ground to dispense moral judgements …

  “Aha!” the old boy commented aloud.

  The old boy was now sitting in front of the filing cabinet and thinking.

  “I ought to read the book again,” he was thinking.

  “But then again,” he continued his thought, “why would I do that? I am not in the mood for reading about concentration camps.”

  “It was dumb of me,” he mused, “to get out my papers,” he added (mentally).

  Upon which the old boy sat in front of the filing cabinet and resumed reading:

  … was a huge and ghastly subject … a sheet of the firm’s headed letter paper …(he turned toward me and away from his typewriter, in which I could see he had inserted a sheet of the firm’s headed letter paper) was a huge and ghastly subject about which there had already been much written by many authors. Yet, he added, as it were reassuringly, he was by no means suggesting that the subject had been completely exhausted. He then informed me that it was the publisher’s normal practice to have three readers assess a manuscript “before a decision is made about its fate.” He was a little coy: they were not in the habit of initiating authors into the publisher’s affairs, but he did not exclude the possibility that he might be the third reader for my novel. He fell silent.

  “Isn’t it a trifle bitter?” he suddenly asked.

  “What?”

  “Your novel.”

  “Oh, indeed,” I replied.

  My response manifestly threw him into confusion.

  “Don’t take what I said for granted; it’s not an opinion, as I haven’t even read your novel yet,” he explained.

  It was now my turn to be confused: the indications were that, to the extent he might feel my novel was bitter, it would probably not be to his taste. This would obviously be a black mark and might set its publication back. Only then did I see that I was sitting opposite a professional humanist, and professional humanists would like to believe that Auschwitz had happened only to those to whom it had happened to happen at that time and place; that nothing had happened to the majority, to mankind—Mankind!—in general. In other words, the publishing man wanted to read into my novel that notwithstanding—indeed, precisely notwithstanding—everything that had happened to happen to me too at that time and place, Auschwitz had still not sullied me. Yet it had sullied me. I was sullied in other ways than were those who had transported me there, it’s true, but I had been sullied none the less; and in my view this is a basic issue. I have to recognize, however—how could it be otherwise?—that anyone who takes my novel in his hand in good faith and innocently starts to read it will thereby, it is to be feared, also be dragged a little bit into the mire.

  I can therefore readily understand why my novel might irritate a professional humanist. But then, professional humanists irritate me because they seek to annihilate me with their cravings: they want to invalidate my experiences. Yet something had happened to those experiences through which, I was taken aback to perceive, they had suddenly turned to my disadvantage, for in the meantime—somehow or other—they had been transformed within me into an irrevocable aesthetic standpoint. The difference of views between me and this man plainly arose from differences in personal convictions between us; but the fact that my novel lay between us, at least symbolically, spoilt everything. I felt that my personal opinions, which my novel exposed utterly, were starting to look inauspicious from the viewpoint of my concerns. On top of which, those concerns, which happened to be embodied in the objective form of the novel, were attached to other factors, less prominent certainly but not negligible for all that—among which were my financial prospects …

  “Aha,” the old boy brightened up.

  … the question of my future, my social status, if I may put it that way.

  “Ha-ha-ha,” the old boy chuckled.

  I suddenly found myself in the fairly strange and—through my lack of foresight—surprising situation of having become a hostage to that two-hundred-and-fifty-page bundle of paper that I myself had produced.

  “To be sure,” the old boy said aloud.

  … I myself had produced.

  “To be sure,” the old boy said aloud once more.

  … I don’t believe that I saw distinctly then what even …

  The telephone.

  This time the old boy had no doubt about it. Nevertheless, he did not get up straight away but merely loosened the wax plug in one ear.

  Indeed it was.

  “No, of course you’re not disturbing me,” the old boy declared (by now into the telephone).

  The old boy was standing in the southeast corner of the room, next to the child’s mini-table, 1st-class special ply of 1st-class sawn hardwood (which in regard to its actual function was more a kind of tiny smoker’s table), and holding a telephone conversation.

  “… and I immediately thought of you,” he heard a muffled female voice through the loosened wax plug. “The book is just right for you; only four hundred and fifty pages, and you would have a six-month deadline. If you really want, you could go two months over that.”

  In point of fact, the old boy also undertook translation work.

  He was a translator from German (German being the foreign language that he still did not understand the best, relatively speaking, the old boy was in the habit of saying).

  The money for translating might not be a lot, but at least it was dependable (the old boy was in the habit of saying).

  Right now, however, he needed to be writing a book.

  On the other hand, it’s true, he also needed to earn some money (maybe not a lot, but at least dependable).

  Besides which, the old boy did not have so much as a glimmer of an idea, little as that may be, for the book he needed to write.

  If he were to accept the translation, he could kill two birds with one stone: he would earn some money (maybe not be a lot, but at least dependable) and also he wouldn’t have to write a book. (For the time being).

  “Yes, of course,” he spoke into the telephone.

  “Then I’ll send you the book, along with the contract,” he heard the muffled female voice through the loosened wax plug.

  “Yes, of course. Thank you,” he heard his own muffled voice (through the loosened earplug).

  “It was stupid of me to accept,” he mused afterwards (stuffing the wax plug back into his ear).

  “But now I’ve gone and accepted it,” he added (mentally) (as if there were no choice in the matter) (though we always have a choice) (even when there is none) (and we always choose ourselves, as one may read in a French anthology) (which the old boy kept on the bookshelf on the wall above the armchair standing to the north of the tile stove that occupied the southeast corner of the room) (but then who chooses us, one might ask) (justifiably).

  … and—through my lack of foresight … I suddenly found myself in the fairly strange and—through my lack of foresight—surprising situation of having become a hostage to the two-hundred-and-fifty-page bundle of paper that I myself had produced.

  “To be sure,” the old boy said.

  … I don’t suppose that I could have seen distinctly then what even today is not entirely clear to me—what sort of trap, what an amazing adventure I had let myself in for. To the best of my recollection, I made do with a fleeting suspicion. It seems my character is such that I am only able to free myself from one captivity by instantly throwing myself into another. I had barely finished my novel and I was already scratching my head over what to write next. Nowadays at least I have an idea of what purpose it all served: it was my way of avoiding worries about tomorrow’s looming proximity. As long as I succeed in arranging a fresh set of homework for myself, I can again confuse the passage of my time and the events which occur within it with the will that I have harnessed to the yoke of my goals. In this way infinity can once again open up before me, even th
ough all I have done is conjure up refractions of light in a real perspective.

  But I still did not know what I should write. I ought to have seen that as a suspicious symptom in itself. To tell the truth, in not one of my lessons that might be counted as such did I manage to sense that significance—what one might call the necessity which sweeps every sober consideration before it—in the way that I did then in that novel; but that, I knew, albeit with a certain sorrow, was by now behind me, once and for all.

  In the end, the spur was given by a trifling street incident. I have always been a believer in long walks, since they allow me to organize my thoughts as I go along. For these purposes I favour cheerful, meditative surroundings such as the banks of the Danube or the hilltops of Buda, where I can yield in delight to the enchantment of each unexpectedly unfolded panorama that brings me to a halt. Before me a hazy blue vista: the built-up flat terrain of the Pest side; here and there a high-rise building, a dome, a glinting roof, or row of windows; in the mid-ground the gleaming ribbon of the river with the arches of the bridges over it. Behind me the grey-green compactness of a hillside, villas, building blocks, the contentment of tranquil homes, the distant television tower. The day in question, as I recall, was humid and stifling hot, the sun beating down viciously on the back of my head out of a white sky. I was bathed in sweat by the time I had crested a highway with a strip of grass running down the middle. The exasperation I felt from the heat, a dull headache, and my indecisiveness had been wound to exploding point by a thousand little things en route: the abrupt switching-on of a screeching siren just as an ambulance had drawn alongside me; the inexplicable outburst of rage from a dog which unexpectedly hurled itself at the railings as I passed by, its demented, hoarse, rancorous barking, which unremittingly accompanied my steps; a half-wit in a boater, short-sleeved shirt, and, dangling on a leather strap that reached from his neck to his belly, a pocket radio which appeared to be equipped with every gadget that a modern radar-detector vessel might need, the crackling howl from which I didn’t seem able to get rid of; my choking and sneezing and my eyes stinging in the dense, black exhaust cloud from a truck that rattled past—in short, the sort of impressions which are inconsequential of themselves but which collectively, and coupled with a degree of mental turmoil, take such a hold on people in big cities as to drive them to unpredictable excesses, individual perversions, anarchistic thoughts, bomb throwing. I had just cut obliquely across the street—quite against the regulations, as a matter of fact. I could hear a bus at my heels, but having got the worst of so many indignities already, I was overcome with an unusual fit of obstinacy: “Screw you! Either pull out or just run over me,” I thought to myself. A blast of the horn, a screeching of brakes: I leapt like a grasshopper which is just about to be trampled on. A torrent of curses broke over my head from the door which opened next to the driver’s cabin. I screamed back. We filled the impartial air with an unproductive cacophony of foul language. I suspect it did us both good: it gave us a chance to vent our accumulated impersonal venoms.