Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

  As a result of which—for what else could he have done?—the old boy by himself represented the other three missing persons; in other words, all the players in the rubber or, to use the technical terminology, both the declarer and the defenders, which had its own undeniable advantages—for instance, it significantly reduced the obstacles to understanding between partners—though one drawback which might be raised is that the open cards made it awkward for the old boy; this may have accounted for the fact that, after announcing as declarer an otherwise easily achievable contract of four hearts he relied on outscoring rather than on finessing the red cards—a tactic whose success could be predicted—and thus ended up losing on the black cards anyway (although, as partner, he had been aware of this well in advance), as a result of which one remaining issue was left to be decided—namely, whether he would rather identify with the losing declarer or with the winning defenders (after brief vacillation the old boy decided in favour of the winning defenders) (yet he was still annoyed at not achieving the easily achievable four hearts)—before he could put the pack of cards back in the small box, and the box in its place (the back right—northwest—corner of the lower drawer of the filing cabinet), shut the filing cabinet and allow his arms—now idle—to fall, by virtue of which what, in the end, was actually a well-established, customary—indeed, one might say, very nearly ritual—position was all at once restored, which is to say:

  The old boy was standing in front of the filing cabinet. He was thinking. It was midmorning (relatively—getting on for ten). Around this time the old boy was in the habit of having a think.

  He had plenty of troubles and woes, so there were things to think about.

  The truth is—not to put too fine a point on it—he should long ago have settled down to writing a book.

  Any old book, just so long as it was a book (the old boy had long been aware that it made no difference at all what kind of book he wrote, good or bad—that had no bearing on the essence of the matter).

  So with a gesture of irritation (as though he now truly did not have too much time to squander) he snatched the folder furnished with the title “Ideas, sketches, fragments” from the upper drawer of the filing cabinet and then tugged out from roughly the centre of the pile of paper scraps and slips and scribbled sheets, practically at random (as though it did not matter to him whether he drew the ace of spades or the two of clubs) (or perhaps more accurately, as though he were well aware that he would not be able to draw either the ace of spades or the two of clubs, since he had shuffled the pack himself) (which already predetermines the strength of the cards that can end up in our hand) (with allowance for the far from consubstantial chances of the just slightly better or slightly worse) (and thereby leaving at least some scope, after all, for the action of the instantaneous planetary constellation) a sheet of note-paper that had already somewhat yellowed at the edges.

  On the sheet of note-paper (already somewhat yellowed at the edges), written with a green felt-tip pen (a type he had not used for some time), he read the following note (idea, outline, or possibly fragment):

  Köves had twice submitted a passport application and three times they had it turned down. Although it was obvious there must have been an administrative error, Köves nevertheless discerned a symbolic significance in the occurrence, so that he finally made up his mind: now he had to leave whatever might happen.

  “So there it is,” the old boy muttered to himself.

  “Just my luck.

  “I remember.

  “I didn’t have any job recommendations.

  “That was a long time back,” he wandered away from the subject (mentally).

  “But what in hell’s name can I make out of this?” he returned again to the subject (mentally).

  “Although,” he thought a bit, “it’s not such a bad idea at that.

  “There are some interesting elements in it.

  “I could make a start with this.

  “One can make a start with anything.

  “What matters is what you aim for.

  “So then what is Köves aiming for?”

  The old boy sat down in front of the filing cabinet and pondered (evidently on the question he had posed himself, which) (as we have cited above) (was what Köves was aiming for).

  “What could Köves have been aiming for, anyway?” was the next question the old boy posed to himself (and from the expression that gradually lit up his face it seemed he was beginning to guess the answer as well).

  The upshot of which was that he got out the typewriter (from the upper drawer of the filing cabinet) (thereby leaving in the drawer only a few files, two cardboard boxes, and behind them a grey box file, on which there was, as a paperweight so to say, a likewise grey—albeit a darker grey—lump of stone), and at the head of the sheet of paper that he fed in, set in the middle, in uppercase type (as a person customarily does) (by general convention) (when writing down the title of something) (his book, let us say), he tapped out the following:

  FIASCO

  and beneath that, after some further pondering, he tapped:

  CHAPTER O

  “For fuck’s sake!” The old boy abruptly broke off his typing at this point, while raising himself halfway from his seat as he reached toward the filing cabinet.

  “Let the old goat shove all seven turns of that rigid corkscrewed poker …” the old boy intoned, unhurriedly and syllable by syllable, while carefully shaping the softened wad of fusible wax between his fingers as he crammed it into his ear, thereby placing himself beyond reach of Oglütz, the Slough of Deceit—in effect, the entire world.

  * * *

  1 Plutarch: “It is indispensable to sail, it is not indispensable to live.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Arrival

  Köves came to with a buzzing in his ears; he had probably fallen asleep, almost missing that extraordinary moment when they descended from starlit altitude into earthly night. Scattered flickers of light showed on the borders of a horizon which tilted constantly with the turns of the aircraft. For all he knew, he could be watching a bobbing convoy of ships on the dark ocean. Yet below them was dry land; could the city really present such a pitiable sight? Köves’ home came to mind, the other city—Budapest—that he had left. Even though he had already been flying for sixteen hours, it now caught up with him for the first time, like a slight tipsiness, the certainty of the distance which separated him from the familiar bend of the Danube, the lamp-garlanded bridges, the Buda hills, and the illuminated wreath of the inner city. Here, too, he had glimpsed a faintly glistening band down there, more than likely a river, and above it the odd sparsely lighted arch—those were presumably bridges; and during the descent he had also been able to make out that on one side of the river the city sprawled out over a plain, while on the other side it was set on hillocky terrain.

  Köves had no chance to make any further observations. The plane touched down, and there was the usual flurry of activity: the unfastening of safety belts, a few quick tugs at crumpled clothing, but Köves was a little unsettled by the aptly brief parting word to the English travelling companion in the next seat—the Englishman flitted all over the globe as a representative for some multinational company, and during the flight Köves had seen the great value of that travel experience—it was, after all, the first time he himself had crossed continents, and moreover he was the only one disembarking at this place. Besides which it seemed as if the strains of the journey were hitting him now, all at once; he could hardly wait to be relieved of his luggage—even though it consisted of just a single suitcase that he might still have need of, he would come back later to reclaim it, with the help of his renowned and affluent friend—and to relinquish himself to the attentions of the staff.

  He waited in vain, however; no one ran up to meet him, the airport terminal was dark and looked completely deserted. What was going on here? Were they on strike? Had war broken out and the airfield been blacked out? Or was it simply apathy, foreigners being left t
o puzzle out where to go? Köves took a few hesitant paces in the direction where he fancied he could see more solid contours in the distance, just possibly the terminal building, but before long he lost his footing—evidently he must have strayed off the runway in the dark—and at the same time he felt as if he had suddenly been smacked in the face: it was the hard beam of a searchlight, directed implacably straight at his face. Köves screwed up his eyes in irritation. At this, almost as if it were acknowledging his indignation, the spotlight slid lower and, giving him a full-body frisk-over so to say, ran before his feet, darting a few yards ahead on the ground before again returning to Köves’s feet and starting all over again. Was this their way of showing him which way to go? A strange procedure at any rate; he could consider equally a courtesy as an order, and while he was pondering that, Köves caught himself already setting off—suitcase in hand—after the light beam dancing before him.

  He had to walk rather a long way. The searchlight may have plunged everything around him into pitch-darkness, but Köves noticed that weed-overgrown soil alternated under his feet with further stretches of runway. These, however, seemed to be narrower, perhaps unsuited for jumbo jets of the kind on which Köves had arrived; perhaps, mused Köves, the runway for the latter had been constructed not long ago, which would explain why it had been laid farther off than these stretches. Or could it be perhaps—he pondered further—that the people here didn’t want foreign travellers to see everything clearly straight away?

  The pencil of light was then suddenly extinguished: evidently he had reached his goal. for Köves now found himself in front of a lighted-up entrance and a person. To be more accurate, the silhouette of a human form, standing several steps higher than him, because the lighting at the entrance was again angled in such a way that Köves was unable to see anything for the glare of light. At least it was at last a person, and the sole reason Köves did not hail him is because in the heat of the moment he could not think of the language in which to wish him a good evening.

  Assistance was soon at hand, though:

  “Just arrived, have we?” the person inquired of him. The question sounded more like a friendly greeting, and the hint of an overtone that was hard to decipher—malicious glee of some kind, perhaps—Köves may well have just imagined.

  “Just now,” he replied.

  “Well I never!” said the man, and again with an overtone that—no doubt because he was unable to see the face addressing him—set Köves puzzling afresh. He was unable to decide if what he was picking out was derision, or even some sort of concealed threat, or just a plain assertion. That uncertainty is what may have triggered him into elaborating, though no one had asked him:

  “I have come to see my friend,” he said. “Only I didn’t let him know in advance, so I could surprise him …”

  “What sort of friend?” the man asked. “Sziklai he’s called … He later changed that to Stone … He’s now known as Sassone, the world-famous writer of comedies and screenplays,” Köves explained. Then, feeling the solid ground of facts beneath his feet: “You must have heard of him!” he added, much more firmly than before.

  “You know very well that we cannot know of a writer by that name here,” came the reply.

  “No?…” Köves queried, and since there was no response, he remarked: “I can’t say I did know, but I’ll bear that in mind.” He stood there in silence for a short while, the yellowish light pouring out of the entrance lengthening his shadow in an odd manner, displaying the suitcase dangling from his hand as an unshapely lump that was part of his body. Then, a good deal more quietly than before, so that after some introductory chat they might strike a more confidential tone, he asked, “Where am I?”

  “At home,” came the answer. It was now the man’s turn to pause a little. Köves caught sight of the slight puff of condensation from his breath in the now-cooling spring night air—at last indisputable corroboration of the person’s physical reality—as the man again spoke. This time he asked Köves with unmistakable amiability, almost a measure of sympathy:

  “Do you wish to turn back?”

  “How would I do that?” Köves asked.

  The man stretched out an arm in a gesture of solicitation, as if he were making Köves a wordless offer. Köves turned round: a row of tiny portholes twinkled almost indiscernibly in the distance. It might perhaps have been the plane in which he had arrived. He was suddenly beset by a rush of homesickness for the guaranteed safety of its passenger compartment, the warmth of its air-conditioned atmosphere, its comfortable seats, its cosmopolitan passenger list, its smiling air hostesses, the unfussy, pull-down-table rituals of the meals, indeed even his bored and close-mouthed English neighbour, who always knew from where it was departing and at where it was arriving.

  “No,” he said, turning back toward the man. “I think there’d be no point in doing that. Now that I’m here,” he added.

  “As you please,” the man said. “We are not forcing you to do anything.”

  “Yes,” Köves acknowledged. “It would be hard for me to prove the opposite.” He pondered a moment. “And yet you are forcing me,” he resumed. “Just like the beam of light that was sent to meet me.”

  “You didn’t have to follow it,” the man instantly retorted.

  “Of course,” Köves said, “of course. I could have stayed out under a raw sky until day breaks or I freeze”—though there was perhaps a touch of rhetorical exaggeration in that, seeing as was spring.

  He caught a swiftly suppressed burst of laughter from above him.

  “Come on, then,” the man eventually said. “Let’s get the formalities over with.” He stepped aside, and Köves was at last able to get under way and climb the few steps.

  Certain preliminaries

  He stepped into an empty, lighted hall; only now did Köves see how deceptive the evening had been outside, for here inside he did not find the lighting anything like as bright; to the contrary, it struck him more as gloomy, even gap-toothed here and there, and all in all fairly dingy. The hall itself was large, but in comparison with the arrivals halls of international airports—as witness the deserted desks, empty cashiers’ windows, and all the other installations over which he cast but a cursory glance—it was provincially small-scale. Köves was now at last able to take a look at the man with whom he had been speaking up to now: in truth, he saw little more than a uniform. The man himself struck him as matching it so well and being so inseparable from it that Köves almost had the impression—obviously a false impression, of course, no doubt prompted by his tiredness—that this uniform had existed from time immemorial and would exist for evermore, and that at all times it moulded its transient wearers to itself. The uniform moreover seemed familiar to him, though without his recognizing it. “It’s not military,” he mused, “nor the police. Nor is it …” he caught himself in a thought that suddenly broke free, to which he could not have put a definite name. At all events, he therefore decided that he was dealing with a customs officer: when it came down to it, nothing—nothing so far, at least—contradicted that.

  Meanwhile the man asked Köves to follow him. He showed Köves into a room which opened straight off the hall: all it was furnished with was a long table, behind which stood three chairs. The customs man, as Köves now called him to himself, immediately went around the table and took a seat facing Köves. Though it might have been an observation of no significance, it struck Köves that he did not occupy the middle chair that was naturally enough on offer, but one of those on either side. Köves had to hand over his papers and to place his suitcase on the table.

  “Please be so good as to go outside, and take a seat,” the customs man then said. “We shall call you when we need you.”

  So, Köves sought a nearby seat for himself; it was an armchair, though its uncushioned, fold-up wooden seat did not hold out hope of too much comfort. From this position he was able to see the entire hall, but while he had been in the office, something had changed out there—most like
ly in the lightning, it occurred to Köves: it was now darker, in the meantime some of the light bulbs had been switched off; maybe they were getting ready to shut down. Indicative of that was that in the far corners of the hall cleaning staff, with leisurely, listless movements, had swung into operation; a man in a cap and blue coat towed a vacuum cleaner along on the immensely long, worn-out, colourless strip of carpeting, but it was a machine of an antiquated kind that Köves had not seen around for a long time: its wheezy humming filling the whole hall with a monotonous drone. Now that nothing bothered him, or maybe because he was already getting used to it, the hall somehow seemed familiar to Köves. He was assailed by a sensation—absurd, of course—that he had passed that way once before, a sensation caused, perhaps, by all the fake natural stone—on the walls, the floors, every conceivable place—and the distinctive lines of the counters and other furnishings: the mark of a certain taste, one might almost say style, which in mid-century could still be considered modern, but which so easily became outmoded with the passage of fifteen or twenty years. Only this, and then the feeling of exhaustion which was again getting the better of him, could have produced the strange illusion that what he was seeing he had already seen once before, and what was happening had already happened to him once before.

  For all that, he didn’t know what was going to happen; Köves was suddenly gripped by a lightheaded, submissive, almost liberated feeling of being ready, all at once, to accept any adventure—come what may, whatever might snatch him, carry him off, and engulf him, whereby his life would take a new turn: Wasn’t that why he had set off this journey, after all? Köves’s life over there—somewhere into the night, or even beyond that, in the remoteness of limitless tracts, maybe in another dimension, who knows?—had, there was no denying it, hit rock bottom. As to how and why, Köves no longer—or for a goodish while at least—wished to think about that. He had probably gone to ruin bit by bit, doggedly, as if he were moving ahead, by imperceptible steps then: he had lived a certain kind of life, stumbled into certain situations, ditched his choices; and finally the colours of failure had emerged out of it all, it had been impossible to deny it any more. It may have begun at birth—or no, rather with his death, or to be more accurate, his rebirth. For Köves had survived his own death; at a certain moment in time when he ought to have died, he did not die, although everything had been made ready for that, it was an organized, socially approved, done deal, but Köves had simply been unwilling to satisfy the circumstances, was unable to withstand the natural instinct for life which was working inside him, not to speak of the good luck on offer, so therefore—defying all rationality—he had stayed alive. Because of that he had been subsequently dogged constantly by a painful sense of provisionality, like someone who is only waiting in a temporary hiding place to be called to account for his negligence; and although Köves himself, probably on account of the delicate structure of his mind—generally the mind—had not been fully aware of this, it nevertheless poisoned his further life and all his actions—even though he was not fully aware of it in point of fact and only saw the bewildering result. In short, he loafed around as a displaced person in his own anonymous life as in a baggy suit he had not been measured for and had been lent to him for some obscure purpose until, one fine day, enlightenment had dawned. This had happened in the shorter spur of a neon-lit, L-shaped corridor (where he had wound up through an utterly immaterial accident), in less than ten minutes (while he had been waiting for something utterly different), from which (having also seen to his accidental business in the meantime) he had stepped out onto the street with a fully formed task to accomplish. That task was essentially—much later, in the civilized, international ambience of the aircraft, for instance, in the company of the muchtravelled Englishman in the neighbouring seat, Köves would have been ashamed to admit it even to himself—to write a novel. It had become clear all too soon, however, that Köves was not in possession of the prerequisites needed for the task: he had no familiarity with the practice of novel-writing, for instance; he saw only in big outlines, but not at all in the more precise details, what kind of novel he should actually write, and yet a novel is composed primarily of its own details; nor did he have a clue as to what a novel was at all, or as to why individuals would write novels, and why he would write one himself, or as to what sense that might have at all, most particularly for himself, and anyway who was he, in point of fact, and so forth—so many thorny questions, then, each on its own able to get a person snared for a lifetime. In the end, the novel had been completed in ten years, during which Köves lost touch with the world. The occasional income that he derived from the entertainment world—since writing the novel rendered Köves increasingly unfit to entertain people—had dwindled dangerously; his wife was forced into self-sacrificing breadwinning, and Köves was anguished to see her gradual acquiescence in a hard fate that she could do nothing to alter; meanwhile, he himself, staying shut up in his room—to be quite precise, the one and only room of their apartment—and lost in an abstract world of signs, practically forgot what life in the outside world was like. On top of all that, having used his last savings to get the novel copied by a typist with a reputation as the best in the business, then had it bound in a glossy folder, it was simply returned by the publisher. “On the basis of the unanimous opinion [of our readers], we are unable to undertake publication of your novel”; “We consider that your way of giving artistic expression to the material of your experiences does not come off, whereas the subject itself is horrific and shocking”; “The fact that it nevertheless fails to become a shattering experience for the reader hinges primarily on the main protagonist’s, to put it mildly, odd reactions”; “For the most part your sentences are clumsy, couched in a tortuous form”—those were samples of what was said in the appended letter to Köves.