Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

“That’ll do,” the old boy deliberated.

  “A little more long-winded than the original,” he deliberated further.

  “But that’s the compactness of the German language for you,” he continued his deliberation.

  “And anyway they pay by the word,” the old boy concluded his deliberations.

  Die Natur. Etwas von mir, repariert sich. Langsames Wachstum, unbeirrbar. Löst sich ab, wie die Zeit, wie Nichtmehrwissen. Was vorher wichtig war—schon wider vergessen. Ebenso: leere Zukunft—das auch. Zukunft: was niemand sich vorstellen kann (wie mit dem Wetter) und was doch kommt.

  “At least this bit is easy,” the old boy cheered up. “I don’t need a dictionary here,” he determined (almost gloatingly).

  Nature—he tapped out briskly—

  Something of me, a part of me, is restored again. A slow, unwavering advance. It works itself loose like time, like forgetting, no-longer-knowing. What was important previously—already forgotten. Just like the empty future—that too. The future: the thing that nobody can envisage (as with the weather) but which comes to pass all the same.

  “Not a bad text at that,” the old boy enthused.

  “The novel too.”

  “A professional job,” he thought enviously.

  “That’s the way to write novels,” he carried on enviously, “with secondhand material, objective formulation, a well-honed technique, three steps back, no autobiography, nothing personal, the author might as well not exist.”

  “An issue of general interest, a guaranteed moneymaker.” His envy intensified.

  Just like the empty future

  that nobody can envisage

  comes to pass all the same.

  The old boy’s gaze held fast to text as if transfixed.

  “Hang on a second!” The old boy leapt up from his place without any apparent (that is to say, external) reason (unless it was something inapparent) (that is to say, internal) (that impelled him to do this) (such as something which suddenly sprung to his mind), and he snatched off the bookshelf on the wall above the sofa occupying the northeast corner of the room a not overly bulky volume in a green half-cloth binding (the very same as the one that in recent days) (as we have already had occasion to recount in the proper place) (the old boy had been leafing through frequently, and to great advantage, in which the old boy evidenced especially appreciative relish for certain lines on page 259 of the volume) (which we have likewise not passed up the opportunity of quoting in the proper place, so that repetition would be superfluous) (all the more so because at this point in our story the old boy) (leafing like greased lightning) (was evidently searching for something else in it, evidently on some other page) (though which one evidently he himself did not know).

  “And even today writing comes hard to me because I have already had to write a lot of letters so that my hand is tired,” the old boy read.

  “The future stands firm, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.”

  “That’s it,” the old boy enthused.

  “As people were long mistaken about the motion of the sun, so they are even yet mistaken about the motion of that which is to come,” the old boy read on further (or, to be more exact, further back) (since the latter line stood before the previous one).

  “it must only just then have entered into them, for they swear,” the old boy read on further (or, to be more exact, further back)

  “in their bewildered fright”

  “It is necessary.”

  “Here we are,” the old boy said.

  “It is necessary—and toward this our development will move gradually—that nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us. We have already had to rethink so many of our concepts of motion, we will also gradually learn to realize that that which we call fate goes forth from within people, not from without into them. Only because so many have not absorbed their fates and transmuted them within themselves while they were living in them have they not recognized what has gone forth out of them; it was so strange to them that, in their bewildered fright, they thought it must only just then have entered into them, for they swear never before to have found anything like it in themselves. As people were long mistaken about the motion of the sun, so they are even yet mistaken about the motion of that which is to come. The future stands firm, dear Mr.. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.”

  The old boy stood firm, book in hand. After some time he moved after all (if not in infinite space, at least to put the book back in its place) (on the bookshelf on the wall above the sofa occupying the northeast corner of the room).

  “I have the awful feeling,” he reflected in the meantime, “that I’m going to get my papers out again.”

  “That would be really stupid,” he reflected further, now standing in front of the open door of the filing cabinet in the upper drawer of which (from which he had earlier removed the typewriter to work on the translation) could be seen several files—among them, one entitled “Ideas, sketches, fragments”—and two cardboard boxes which held a miscellany of objects (both necessary and unnecessary), behind which was a grey box file on which, like a sort of paperweight, was a likewise grey—albeit a darker grey—lump of stone (not visible).

  “There’s still time to have second thoughts about this,” he continued his reflection (as if he could really have second thoughts) (that is to say, like someone who still has a choice) (but all the while knows full well that he doesn’t) (even though we always have a choice) (and we always choose ourselves—in the words of the French anthology to which we have already referred) (which the old boy kept on the wall bookshelf above the armchair standing to the north of the tile stove occupying the southeast corner of the room) (for this is what our freedom amounts to) (although one might ask in what manner such a choice could be said to be freedom) (if in point of fact we can make no other choice than ourselves).

  On account of which the old boy was soon rooting again among his papers and, what is more, on this occasion sitting on the sofa occupying the northwest corner of the room—perhaps partly to emphasize the transience of this activity, the deferment for a merely fleeting interval of his more important work, but partly also because he was unable to take his proper place in front of the filing cabinet (or to be more precise, at the table) (or to be even more precise, the table, the only real table in the flat), it (which is to say the table) being covered with the accoutrements of his more important work (the book to be translated, the piles of blank as well as already typed paper, the typewriter, and the Concise Dictionary):

  … This turn of events … sitting in the ar … irrevocable … I was left alone … robbed … I therefore face what stands before me without my past, without a destiny, without heartwarming delusions, robbed of everything I had. I see a billowing, grey, impenetrable bank of cloud and sense that I must force my way through it, though I have no idea in which direction I should strike out. No matter, in that case I won’t move and it can come to meet me, force its way over me, and then pass on, leaving me behind. This is time, what they call the future. Sometimes I scrutinize it anxiously, at other times I wait trustingly for it as for sunshine in foggy weather. Yet I am well aware that it’s all an illusion, and even now I am only deceiving myself, I am fleeing in just the same way that I once launched myself into infinity on the rocket of my goals: it’s not the future which is waiting for me, only the next instant, because there is no future, it is nothing other than the ever-continuing, eternal present. Not a single minute can be omitted, or at most only in stories. The prognosis for my future—that’s an attribute of my present. Yes, the time passing is me; and that—me—is exactly what I am least sure about.

  If only I could say I made a mistake! Only I don’t know if it is not I myself who is the mistake. Now and again, my feet set me off on my accustomed meditative journeys—and not just in my apartment. I take an interest in nature—what else can I do? I contemplate autumn’s destruction with gloomy satisfaction, breathe in deeply the spark
ling aroma of decay. The other day, I was just making my way down the hillside when I saw two old men. They were standing at the foot of a stone wall, faces turned toward the languorous warmth: they were sunbathing. They were snuggled up so closely to the no doubt lukewarm stone that at first I took the two grizzled heads jutting out from the grey wall to be stones too, unusually lifelike reliefs. It was only on coming closer that I saw they were alive. One had a long, ovine face with eyes like molten aspic and a red tip to his sheep’s nose; the other face was somewhat rounder, but a curving mouth, drawn into a half-smile under his square, grey moustache, lent him too a bit of the air of a faun. I don’t know why they fascinated me so much. I fancied that I discerned some indefinable yet completely identical expression on the two faces, an involuntary expression which was not tied to the moment, nor even to their words—they might have been talking about anything at all—but sprang from somewhere deeper, from some conduit of their existence, bubbling far below. When I passed by them they fell silent, as if they had some kind of secret—no, on the contrary, as if they had something to say, and it was precisely that which they were keeping secret, but it had already moved to their faces like the ruins of some defeat that they were reluctantly obliged to display to their fellow human beings, in part as a warning, in part out of weakness, somewhat maliciously and at all events improperly, yet beseeching a little attention.—Well indeed, if death is an absurdity, how can life have any meaning? If death is meaningful, then what is the purpose of life? Where did I lose my redeeming impersonality? Why had I written a novel and, above all, yes, above all, why had I invested all my trust in it? If I could only work that out …

  I pay regular visits to my mother. I sometimes hear her tell stories about a young woman who had a little boy. On these occasions I usually listen politely, discreetly hiding my boredom. Yet nowadays I find myself paying attention to her, even watching out for what she says; I listen as if I were increasingly expecting her to suddenly unmask a secret. For in the end, the child in question once upon a time had been me. As the saying goes, the child is father to the man. Maybe I shall manage to catch out this sneaky brat, so passively ready to adapt to every circumstance, expose a word, a deed, anything which would hint at his future activity—writing a book. Yes, that’s how far it has gone with me, how low I am stooping, if you will; I would make do with anything—my astrological chart at birth, the critical DNA sequences of my genes, the mystery lurking in my blood grouping, anything, I tell you, to which I might give a nod of assent, or at least reconcile myself that this was the way it had to be, this was what I was born to be, as if I were not perfectly aware that we are not born to be anything but, if we manage to live long enough, we cannot avoid becoming something in the end.

  I take a book down from the shelf. The volume exudes a musty smell—the sole trace that a finished work and a completed life can leave behind in the air: the smell of books. “It was on the 28th of August, 1749, at the stroke of twelve noon, that I came into the world in Frankfurt on the Main,” I read. “The constellation was auspicious: the Sun was in Virgo and at its culmination for the day. Jupiter and Venus looked amicably upon it and Mercury was not hostile. Saturn and Mars maintained indifference. Only the Moon …” Yes, that is the way to be born, as a man of the moment - of a moment when who knows how many others were likewise born on this globe. Only the rest of them did not leave a book smell behind and so they don’t count. The cosmic constellation arranged the lucky moment for a single birth. That is how a genius, a great creative figure, sets foot on earth—like a mythical hero. An unfilled place longs yearningly for him, his advent so long overdue that the ground is practically moaning out for it. Now all that has to be done is to await the most favourable constellation, which will assist him just as much through the difficulties of birth as through the uncertain beginnings, the years of hesitancy, until that shining moment when he enters the realm of recognition. Looking back from the pinnacle of his career, there will no longer be room in his life for any contingency, since his very life has assumed the form of necessity. His every deed and every thought is important as a carrier of the motives of Providence, his every declaration pregnant with the symbolic marks of an exemplary development. “A poet,” he pronounces later, “should have an origin, he must know where he springs from.”

  I suppose he is right: that truly is the most important thing.

  Well then, at the time I came into the world the Sun was standing in the greatest economic crisis the world had ever known; from the Empire State Building to the Turul-hawk statues on the former Franz Josef Bridge, people were diving headlong from every prominence on the face of the earth into water, chasm, onto paving stone—wherever they could; a party leader by the name of Adolf Hitler looked exceedingly inimically upon me from amidst the pages of his book Mein Kampf; the first of Hungary’s Jewish laws, the so-called Numerus Clausus, stood at its culmination before its place was taken by the remainder. Every earthly sign (I have no idea about the heavenly ones) attested to the superfluousness—indeed, the irrationality—of my birth. On top of which, I arrived as a nuisance for my parents: they were on the point of divorcing. I am the material product of the lovemaking of a couple who did not even love one another, perhaps the fruit of one night’s indulgence. Hey presto, suddenly there I was, through Nature’s bounty, before any of us had had a chance to think it through properly. I was a healthy child, my milk teeth broke through, I started to burble, my intellect burgeoned; I began to grow into my rapidly proliferating materiality. I was the little son in common of a daddy and mummy who no longer had anything in common with one another; a pupil at a private institution into whose custody they entrusted me while they proceeded with their divorce case; a student for the school, a tiny citizen for the state. “I believe in one God, I believe in one homeland, I believe in the resurrection of Hungary,” I prayed at the beginning of the school day. “Rump Hungary is no land, reunified Hungary the heavenly land,” I read from the caption on a wall map outlined with bloody colour. “Navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse,”1 I parroted in Latin class. “Shoma Yisroel, adonai elohenu, adonai ehod,” I learned in religious instruction. I was fenced in on all sides, my consciousness taken into possession: they brought me up. With a loving word here and stern warnings there, they gradually ripened me for slaughter. I never protested, I endeavoured to do what was asked of me; I languished with torpid goodwill into my well-bred neurosis. I was a modestly diligent if not always impeccably proficient accomplice to the unspoken conspiracy against my life.

  But enough. It is not worth searching for my origins: I have none. I landed in a process that, thanks to my inborn sense of mistiming, I took for a beginning. Like everybody else, I have one or two anecdotes and a few personal memories, but what do they signify? At the right temperature, they dissolve without trace into the communal mass, unite with the inexhaustible material churned out in general hospitals and disposed of in mass graves or, in more fortunate cases, in mass production. In hunting for my origins I see nothing but a packed and never-ending queue, my century on the march. Blinded, now staggering, now breaking into a trot, I too stumbled along in the soporific warmth of the herd. But at some point—who knows why—I stepped out of the line: I did not go on further. I sat down beside the ditch and my glance suddenly fell on the stretch of the way I had put behind me. Could this be what literary men call “talent”? Hard to believe it. I had given no sign of any talent in a single act or word or other manifestation—unless it was in managing to stay alive. I did not dream myself into invented stories; I did not even know what to do with the things that had happened to me. Not once had my ears resounded to the biddings of vocation; the totality of my experiences could convince me only of my superfluousness, never of my importance. I was not endowed with the redeeming word; I was not interested in perfection or beauty, not even knowing what those are. I regard notions of glory as the masturbation fantasies of senile old men, immortality as simply risible. I didn’t start on my novel in o
rder to have a verifiable occupation. If I were an artist, I would entertain or teach; my work would be of interest to me, not the reason why I had produced it.

  Having got that off my chest, I can discern only one possible explanation for my stubborn passion: maybe I had started writing in order to gain my revenge on the world. To gain revenge and regain from it what it had robbed me of. Perhaps my adrenal glands, which I managed to preserve intact even from Auschwitz, are hypersecretors of adrenaline. Why not? After all, representation contains an innate power in which the aggressive instinct can subside for a moment and produce an equipoise, a temporary respite. Maybe that is what I wanted. Yes, to grab hold, if only in my imagination and by artistic means, of the reality that all too really holds me in its power; to subjectivize my perpetual objectivity, to become the name-giver instead of the named. My novel was no more than a response to the world—evidently the sole way of responding as best I can. To whom else would I have been able to address this response if, as we all know, God is dead? To nothingness, to my unknown fellow human beings, to the world. It did not turn out as a prayer but as a novel.

  But let us not exaggerate: that is already literature. In the end it may yet transpire that I do, indeed, have some talent for writing, which would make me truly sorry since I did not start writing because I have talent; on the contrary, when I decided I would write a novel, evidently I also decided, by the bye, that I would become talented. I needed it; there was a job to be done. I had to aim to write a good book, not out of vanity but in the nature of the beast, so to say. I could not do otherwise: by some mysterious means, the necessity to give a response condensed within me into freedom, like a gas subjected to very high pressure. What was I supposed to do with this unformed and intolerable feeling? Freedom sometimes becomes purely a question of expertise. Even a bad novel can be freedom—it is just that the freedom is unable to reveal itself, precisely because the book prevents it. At least now I know it is no use my tugging at the halter of the writer’s fate; its diabolical irony will keep me in harness. Whatever my original motive, I can only justify the character of this personal business if I also offer others something at the same time. All of a sudden, I found that the aggrieved hand which had been poised to strike was holding a novel, and now with a deep bow I was trying to place it as a festive gift under everybody’s Christmas tree.