Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

  A silence descended. Köves irresolutely stood his ground; he was ransacking his brains for a question that he just could not put his finger on, so instead of that he finally asked:

  “What do you intend to do with me?”

  “That depends on you,” the person in the middle replied forthwith. “We didn’t invite you; you arrived here,” and here it crossed Köves’s mind that he had heard something of the kind already from his own customs man.

  “Of course I did. But then why’s that so important?” he asked.

  “We didn’t say that it was,” came the answer. “But if it is important, then it’s not important for us. You should quiz yourself, not us.”

  “About what?” Köves, grumpy from drowsiness, asked like a child.

  “About what brought you here.” That wasn’t a question, nor was it an assertion, yet Köves still found himself cudgeling his brains for an answer, and like someone plucking an incoherent image at random from his fragmentary dreams, he finally muttered:

  “I saw a beam of light, I followed that.”

  His rambling reason, however, must have stumbled on the right words, because his answer was evidently judged favourably:

  “Carry on following it,” the chief customs man said, nodding more mildly, indeed with a quiet, enigmatic seriousness that was suddenly transmitted to the faces of the two customs men on either side of him, the way these things do with underlings: somewhat exaggerating the original model, as a result of which an expression of some kind of rigid, implacable solemnity now appeared on the two outer faces, and Köves would not have been astonished—or at least that’s how he felt at this juncture—if they had risen to their feet and saluted or started to sing. Without turning their heads that way, their gazes slipped over toward the chief customs man; he, however, did not move, and he now carried on, once more in his earlier manner:

  “Your papers are in order. We shall treat you as if you had been domiciled abroad. Obviously you will wish to continue your original activity. In this envelope,” and here he placed a brown envelope on the table before Köves, “you will find the key and the address of your apartment. Consider it an object that has been on deposit—as if you had left it with us and were now getting it back. Your suitcase will remain here. We’ll let you know when and where you can pick it up.”

  He fell silent. Then in a tone which, apart from a certain conditioned mechanicalness, expressed nothing: no promise, but also no rejection:

  “Welcome back!” and stretching out his arm he pointed toward the door.

  CHAPTER TWO

  On waking the next day. Preliminaries. Köves sits down.

  Although he had been allocated his home, Köves did not spend the remaining hours of that night in his bed; as to exactly where he did spend them, in the first moments of starting up from an, in all likelihood, brief and light, yet nonetheless all-obliterating dream, maybe he did not know either. The sky had assumed a glassy brightness; his limbs felt stiff and numb, his shoulder blades were pressed up against the back of a bench in the park area of a public square, his neck felt as if it had been dislocated: it could be that as he was sleeping he had simply laid it on the shoulder of the stranger seated next to him, a basically well-built, tubby man wearing a polka-dot bow-tie.

  “Woken up, have we?” the stranger inquired with a friendly smile on his moon face.

  Since Köves was still staring at him wordlessly, and with the confused gaze of someone who has been awakened suddenly, he added by way of explanation:

  “You had a good long sleep here, on my shoulder.” From which it seemed that they must have got onto informal speaking terms in the course of the night. But no, only now did Köves recall that the man had spoken in a familiar tone from the very start, had addressed him as if they were already acquainted—obviously confusing him with someone else—and he, Köves, had let it pass, not being one to stand on his dignity. Köves also recollected that his new acquaintance had called himself a bar pianist, who had come from his place of work, a nearby nightclub (Köves had been utterly amazed to note to himself at the time that—whatever next!—the place even has a nightclub), in order to clear his lungs of the bar’s smoky air here on the park bench.

  How long could he have been asleep? A minute or an hour? Köves looked disorientedly around: the sparsely placed street lamps were still lit—green-flamed gas lamps on cast-iron posts with spiral ornaments, as in Köves’s happier childhood days—and electric lights were glowing here and there in the windows of the grey, shabby houses surrounding the square. Köves could practically hear the bustling going on behind them, the rushed and hasty noises of waking up and getting ready, and was almost waiting for the as yet closed front doors to spring open and people to pour out of the damp doorways and line up in order to be counted. He must have dreamed something, his irrational ideas were mostly likely still being fed by that, yet Köves was nevertheless seized by a disagreeable emotion, a sense of having omitted to do something: he had already been put on a roll call somewhere, he was missing from somewhere, and an irreparable silence would be the response to the strident announcement of his name.

  “I have to go!” he suddenly jumped up from the bench.

  “Where to?” The pianist registered surprise, and it occurred to Köves just how often, over the past hours, this surprised, or at least surprised-sounding, voice had already held him back from leaving.

  “Home,” he said.

  “What for?” With his eyes rounded and hands outspread, the pianist certainly looked like someone who was unable to make head or tail of Köves, again rousing the feeling in Köves that only at the expense of an unusual effort would he be able to convey his intentions, which even then would be left as some sort of ludicrous cavilling.

  “I’m tired,” he said hesitantly, as if offering an excuse.

  “So, relax!” The pianist patted the broken planks of the bench with a podgily soft hand. Perhaps still not truly awake, Köves felt his resistance weakening; the earlier pressing urgency had been replaced within him by a pleasant torpidity.

  “You can’t put your head down now anyway,” the pianist explained, as though to a child. “By the time you snuggle into bed and fall asleep, the alarm clock will be ringing. Or is it just that your mind won’t rest unless you are rushing around after something?” Catching on slowly, as it were, Köves was now starting to be almost ashamed of himself, feeling he could be convinced of anything if he came up against the necessary patience or energy.

  “Sit back down for a while,” the pianist continued. “Look!” he produced from his coat pocket a flat bottle that was already rather familiar to Köves. “There’s a drop still slopping about the bottom of this. That’ll bring you round.” So Köves complied again, as he had so many times during the hours which had passed. Those hours had now left in Köves’s mind an impression merely of some sort of obscure struggle of which he himself seemed to be not so much a participant as merely the object—an object that he was soon happier to abandon to the enemy than quarrel over, because, or so Köves felt—right then it was just a burden to him. This mind-numbing exhaustion, the night’s unclassifiable experiences, then to top it all those fine, fiery slugs he had swigged from the continually proffered bottle—that had to be the reason why even now, with his mind clearing, Köves was only able to summon up a few fragmentary details.

  At all events, he had got into town from the airport by bus; Köves remembered how he had tried to stay alert, but his head had kept growing heavy with sleep and dropping onto his chest. His aim had been as clear as it was obscure: first of all, to reach a bed, in order at last to get a good sleep, with everything else taking its turn after that. He found the full address of his apartment in the envelope, at the top of a printed page, which had an official appearance: a registration form or a permit, in the dim lighting of the airport arrivals hall, and in his haste to reach the bus, Köves did not try to make head or tail of it, the one thing he managed to pick out being that he was obliged at al
l times to show it at the behest of any authority. Köves had a vague idea that he had already walked down the designated street—not here, of course, not one street of which he had seen as yet, let alone walked down, but in the place from which he had started on life’s journey, his native city, Budapest; but Köves managed quite easily to gloss over this difference, despite the fact that it might have become a source of misunderstanding, because he was cherishing a hope that he would find his street here, too, and if there was no other way, then he would get into a taxi, his purse would stand that.

  The bus, a decrepit rattletrap of a crate, shook the very spirit from him. Köves saw factories, endless dismal suburbs, neglected, tumbledown dwellings, then nothing, after which a jolt again startled him awake: they were snaking along barely lit side streets, the windows were dark, a reek of insecticide was seeping out of the houses, the streets were deserted. Köves recalled there being later on a broad, dark thoroughfare with vacant lots between the houses, then a sharp bend, and all at once he found himself in a square (as best he recalled he was asked to get off, because they had reached the terminus), where Köves in the first flush of curiosity looked around with a measure of inward approval, as though he knew exactly where he had arrived.

  Yet he soon realized that this feeling of his ran counter to sound common sense and, of course—as became clear on closer inspection—counter to reality. All it came down to was Köves’s hunch that he had seen the square somewhere before now, in the way that, arriving like this, in the middle of the night, at any central square of that kind, in any city, might have seemed familiar to him at first glance—from his dreams, from movies, from travel brochures, from illustrated guidebooks, from memories of unfathomable origin. The square to which it bore a likeness, or rather to which he likened it, Köves had last seen in Budapest before he had left on his travels: it was a quadrangular square, girded by proud buildings, in the middle of which was a diminutive park, in which stood an imposing group of statues. Now, this square too was unquestionably quadrangular, but of course differently: there were buildings here as well—even the dim street lighting revealed something of their original magnificence—yet what a lamentable sight they presented now! All maimed, senile war invalids. Köves was dumbfounded. Blackened walls, peeling plasterwork, pitting, and clefts everywhere. Were they bearing the traces of fighting? Had they been struck by some natural calamity? One of the houses, as if blinded, was lacking the entire row of windows on its uppermost floor, and in place of ornamental portals and elegant shops were mute gateways and boarded-up shop windows. In the middle of this square too Köves saw a sculptural group, the shoulders and chest of its main subject—a seated man—towering on a high plinth spattered with bird droppings, and he stepped closer in order to look him in the eyes (that sombre expression might, perhaps, put him on the right track), but the bowed head stared, sunk uncommunicatively, inscrutably, into darkness.

  The square was deserted, with no sign of any taxi or night transport; Köves set off on foot with the peculiar assurance of a person led by memory, or by his travel experiences, although he could not boast of any travel experience, nor could memory have guided him in a place he had never been before. He left streets behind him, the houses bordered the line of his steps like decimated, lurching beggars, and Köves recalled that he had been startled when an infant had suddenly cried out from behind a window, as if he were surprised that children were also raised in this city. At street corners he was always gripped by the same shy hope: each time he hoped he had lost his way. Yet each and every time he came upon precisely the place he had known in advance, and at worst he did not recognize it immediately; for instance, in the place of a tall building he might now find a ruin or an empty lot; in place of a specific stretch of street that he would look for in vain, he would find one of a different character yet, in the end, exactly the same.

  In Köves’s memory, these minutes remained the most testing: he was going around a foreign city with whose every nook and cranny he was nevertheless familiar—a strange sensation. Köves did not know how to wrestle with it. His legs were leaden, as if he were walking not on asphalt but in sticky tar. At one point, he noticed by the edge of the pavement an advertising pillar, which was adorned with just one poster, and even that was a scrap, for the greater part of it had been ripped off or become detached due to the vicissitudes of the weather. CITY OF LIGHT, Köves read in big capitals. Was it an advertisement? A slogan? A cinema bill? A command? At all events the street was dark; Köves was reminded of how full of hope he had been on arrival, the unhesitating confidence with which he had followed that beam of light; though it had happened only shortly before, Köves still felt as if he had travelled an endless road since then, up hill and down dale, from the warmth into the cold, and the road he had covered had used up all his strength. The sense of wonder had quit him, bit by bit; he was seized by a benevolent weakness, and in the way he ran his hand over a scabby house wall or a boarded-up shop window, in the way his steps found their way in the already familiar streets, Köves was possessed by that unfamiliar, and yet at the same time relaxed, almost intimate sense of homelessness that was on the verge of suggesting, to an intellect sinking back into dull exhaustion, that he was, indeed, back home.

  At this point, his recollections started to become disjointed, even undirected, like his steps; he again emerged into a square somewhere; he rambled along a dusty promenade among broken see-saws, abandoned sandcastles, heavy, ungainly benches that had been left high and dry from bygone days, and might have been taken for a wandering drunk—at least that was how the question, full of good-humoured support, and addressed to him from one of the benches, sounded to his ears:

  “Whither, whither into the night are you going, old pal?” And he can hardly have dispelled that impression with his answer:

  “Home,” which had the ring of a gentle complaint. The man who had addressed him—Köves saw him in the murk of the spreading tree which overhung the bench more as an indistinct blob—was assuming a grave air as he nodded understandingly, like someone who fully appreciated that little good could be waiting for Köves back home.

  “So is it far to go still?” he pressed his inquiries. In a rather doubtful tone, like someone who would not be surprised if he were to be informed that he was talking nonsense, Köves named the street, but the man merely said, with a renewed sympathetic nod:

  “Well yes, that’s a fair way off from here.”

  “But shorter if I go out by the bank of the Danube,” Köves gave it another go, again rather as if he were counting on being rebutted, on having it explained to him, for example, that he was blathering, there was no bank of the Danube here, while nobody had heard of the street, yet the stranger merely disputed whether Köves would really be able to cut his journey in the direction he had indicated:

  “Take a breather first, chum!” he proposed, and Köves slowly, awkwardly lowered his body to sit beside him—for just a couple of minutes, of course, in order to pull himself together—on the bench.

  Continuation

  But as to how they whiled away those few hours, sitting here next to each other, that—apart from his ever more uncertain attempts to depart (as if he did not just tolerate but frankly expected the pianist, each and every time to prevail upon him to stay)—Köves would have found it hard to say. Naturally they had talked; they had probably entertained themselves with funny stories, because Köves recollected having laughed. It had not taken long for the flat bottle to materialize for the first time from the pianist’s pocket, and, turning it round and round in a hand raised on high, he had done his utmost to capture on it the dying rays of the moon descending onto a nearby house roof:

  “Cognac,” he whispered playfully in a respectful, all but reverential tone.

  At all events, he soon took Köves into his confidence, relating that he played in a nightclub called the Twinkling Star:

  “I’m acting as if you didn’t know, being that you’re one of our regulars,” he said.
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  “Oh yes,” Köves hastened to confirm.

  “Though I haven’t seen much of you recently.” The pianist peered at Köves with a frown, looking suspicious all of a sudden: “Who exactly are you, anyway?” he asked, as if he had unexpectedly regretted having asked Köves to sit beside him, and, having scratched his head in vain to come up with some sort of explanation or justification as to his identity, all that Köves could say in his sudden confusion was:

  “Who indeed?” and shrugged his shoulders. “I’m called Köves,” he added; it was odd to hear his name sounding so insignificant that it rang almost disparagingly.

  Yet it seemed this completely reassured the pianist: from the bottomless, satchel-like pockets of the overcoat that lay unbuttoned on his belly there now emerged sandwiches in paper serviettes.

  “Life is short, the night is long,” he said merrily. “I always stock up before closing time. Go ahead!” he offered them to Köves, himself taking a big bite of one. “In the Twinkling Star,” he carried on with his mouth full, “you can come by exclusive nibbles, can’t you, even in this day and age.” The pianist at this point pulled a one-sided smile, as if he were speaking contemptuously about the place, about which, at one and the same time, in a manner Köves would have found hard to explain, he was nevertheless bragging. “When was the last time you ate any ham?” He winked at Köves.

  “This evening,” Köves gave himself away.

  “Oh!” The pianist was amazed. “Where?”