Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

  “On the flight,” said Köves. “That’s what the stewardess brought round,” he added by way of explanation, at which the pianist burst out laughing, as if he had finally made Köves out, and after some hesitation, and at first by no means as heartily but then all the more self-forgetfully, as if something had lifted inside him, Köves joined in.

  “So, tell me now,” the pianist said, slapping his thigh, “what else did you have?”

  “Cold sirloin of beef, a peach, wine, chocolate,” Köves recited, and both of them doubled up with laughter, so that even Köves had the feeling he was giving voice to distant fantasies, and childish ones at that, which were of no use at all other than for giving the grown-ups something to laugh about for a few minutes.

  A bit later, however, the pianist again became long-faced; it seemed as if, behind the cheerfully glib words, he had continued to be preoccupied with disquieting thoughts, and he made ever more frequent references to his occupation and the nightclub, especially after Köves had remarked that it must be great to be an instrumentalist: he, Köves, supposed that a musician’s life was a truly splendid, independent life, all it required was the talent for it, but that was something that he, Köves, sadly did not have.

  It seemed, though, that he had said the wrong thing, because to all intents and purposes the pianist took offence:

  “I’m well aware what you people think of me,” he said, as if Köves belonged to a large circle of some kind who were all his adversaries: “He,” and here he obviously meant himself, “he has it easy! He’s got a good thing going for him! He plonks away a bit on the piano every evening, croons into a microphone, pockets the tips, and that’s your lot!… Huh!” he gave an indignant laugh, so to say, to behold such ignorance.

  “And it isn’t?’ Köves wished to know.

  “How would it be?’ the pianist burst out. “In a place where whiskey is also being purveyed!”

  “Why?” Köves asked. “Shouldn’t it be?”

  “Most certainly!” the pianist said. “But I ask you … Or rather not I, because it’s of no interest to me, but …” The pianist now looked a bit flustered, as if he had become trapped in a sentence that could not be continued, and out of the shadow of the branches arching over his head he cast a swift glance at Köves, seated in the glimmering of the starry sky, before, having palpably calmed down on the one hand, but ever more agitatedly on the other, he carried on: “So anyway, as to who drinks the whiskey … what pays for it?! And why whiskey, of all things?!”

  Köves responded that he was in no position to know.

  “And you think I ought to?!” the pianist heatedly rejoined, so Köves deemed it advisable to hold his peace, because it seemed to him that whatever he might say, right now it would only nettle him.

  As it was, the pianist quickly calmed down:

  “Right, let’s have a slug!” He raised the bottle in Köves’s direction.

  The cheerfulness was restored for only a brief period, however:

  “Then there’s the numbers …” He fretted some more.

  Köves had the feeling that this time he was only expecting to be prompted:

  “What numbers?” he lent a helping hand.

  “The ones I’m not supposed to play,” the pianist replied straightaway, in a slightly plaintive tone.

  “Banned numbers?” Köves pumped him some more.

  “What do you mean, ‘banned’?!” the pianist protested. If only they were, he explained, then he would not get the headaches either. What was banned was banned, a clear-cut matter: it was there on the list, and he wouldn’t play it for any money. Except that there were other numbers, he continued, which were, how should he put it, tricky numbers; numbers which did not appear on any lists, so nobody could claim they were banned numbers; but then it was still not advisable to play them—and of course, they were the ones requested by most of the guests.

  “Now, what can I say to them? That they’re banned?” he posed the question, obviously not to Köves, but then it nevertheless seemed as though it were to him. “That would be slanderous, wouldn’t it, even worse than my just playing them!” he went on to answer that himself. “How can I say a musical number is banned when, on the contrary, it is permitted, just tricky, and thus undesirable—though one cannot say even that about it, because if it were undesirable, then it would be banned …”

  The pianist relapsed into a troubled silence, clearly rejecting the solution that, on the basis of what he heard, Köves too had to regard as inexpedient, but otherwise he accompanied the pianist’s words with much nodding, feeling that he was hearing about interesting things, and even if he could not understand him in every respect, of course, he found that what the pianist was saying was nevertheless not entirely unfamiliar.

  “Or,” he levelled a fresh question at Köves, “am I to tell them that I don’t know the number?”

  Köves, tiring a bit by this point, felt it made a certain sense.

  “But then what kind of pianist does that make me?” The pianist gazed reproachfully at Köves, and Köves conceded that, to be sure, he had not taken that objection into consideration. “I’m renowned,” the pianist complained, or at least it sounded as if he were complaining, “for knowing every number in the book. That’s what I make a living from, and I don’t just make a living from it: I really do know every number in the book, I …,” and at this point the pianist looked disconcerted, as if he did not know how he should express sentiments that he maybe did not wish to express in full. “So anyway,” he carried on, “I won’t budge on that. You could ask me why.…” He glanced at Köves, but Köves didn’t ask anything. “Even so, the only answer I have is that I won’t give an inch.” For a while he sat mutely beside Köves, presumably deliberating. “I won’t let my good name be besmirched!” he announced abruptly, almost angrily, as it were against his better judgement. “Ah!” he then let fling. “How would you people know what it is like when an evening comes to the end, the low lighting is turned off, I shut the lid of the piano, and I start to ruminate about what numbers I have played, and who requested them, who was sitting at the tables, and who could that unknown chap be who …” The pianist fell silent, and for a long time he said no more, so Köves could only guess that he might be occupied with what he had just referred to as “ruminating.”

  As time passed, however, he seemed to forget that, too, and the good humour returned; yet the earlier weariness descended afresh on Köves’s senses. The last words that he believed he heard were the following: “Don’t ever feel embarrassed, old friend, just lay your head on my shoulder. If you want, I’ll even hum a lullaby into your ear”—and maybe it was not the pianist who said them but Köves who dreamed them, because by then he was asleep.

  Daybreak. Motor trucks. Köves speaks his mind.

  So, Köves was still—or again—sitting there, and the fire of the last drop of the pianist’s drink was coursing beneficially through his veins.

  “How long are we going to stay?” he asked, to which the pianist tersely said no more than:

  “Not long now,” though he seemed in the meantime to be paying Köves hardly any attention. In the nascent light, Köves was now readily able to distinguish his slack and yet lively face: a new expression was displayed on that face—an expression which was abstracted yet at the same time uneasy. The ponderous body also shifted, with its limbs as it were rearranging themselves: the trunk which up till then had been turned toward Köves, was now leaning back; the feet, which had been slipped into shiny patent-leather shoes with old-fashioned pointed toes, were stretched out before him; the arms were outspread on the back of the seat—so long were his arms that one hand was dangling behind Köves from the end of the seat back—and he was visibly concentrating his whole attention on the street, as if he were awaiting someone who ought to be coming into view any time now. And Köves was assailed by a feeling—again an absurd feeling, just like he’d had the previous evening at the airport—that he too had been waiting all along, and was
waiting now, for the same thing that the pianist was waiting for, even though he did not know, of course, precisely what it was they were waiting for, indeed, even whether they were waiting for anything at all in the first place.

  So, he shifted his position, he too stretched out comfortably, lounging as if he were at home, so their arms were entwined, although they, like animals squeezed into a refuge, may not even have noticed this. Perhaps because his eyes had adjusted to it, but perhaps because his viewpoint had altered in the meantime, Köves did not judge the square as being so woeful now as he had done at night. The one thing that bothered him a little was a black firewall which was standing solitarily, looking as if a hurricane had blown the rest of the house away from it. Farther off extended a broad thoroughfare that Köves fancied he recognized, though in all probability this was a trick of the still uncertain light, because on closer inspection it proved not to be the street he had recognized, or at least that his eyes and his feet were used to. From that direction movement and scraps of sound drew Köves’s attention to them: people were gathering in front of a pulled-down iron roll-shutter, mainly women, still in make-do clothing, sloppy, their heads bound in curlers. So they’ve started queuing up this early: no doubt it’s for milk, thought Köves, seeing the cans and bottles that were dangling from the hands. From another direction there suddenly appeared hurrying, sullen-browed passers-by, so many silent reproaches as far as Köves was concerned; whether lugging bags or swinging empty hands, they were heading to wherever it was that for some reason—presumably obvious to them—they needed to be present. With heavy clattering, boxed-shaped trams began carrying their as yet sparse human cargoes hither and thither; cars whisked by, and Köves stared at them in bafflement at first, but before long he grew accustomed to their angular, cumbersome shapes. With a loud jolting on the even cobblestones, motor trucks also now appeared, two of them, one behind the other, and Köves may well have been daydreaming, because he was late in noticing their strange freight: people were seated on their platforms, men, women, and, so it seemed, even children. Their bundles and belongings, the odd piece of furniture, indicated that these were families who were moving house—all that was missing being at most any sign of joy or excitement or even anxiety, not to say vexation, at such a removal, at what was, therefore, some kind of change, a new circumstance in life. The lifeless faces, possibly still worn from an early wakening, passed before Köves’s eyes in the dawn as if they were turning their backs indifferently on what they were leaving behind. Maybe because they were united in their sullen bad humour with those who were transporting them, Köves was slightly tardy in distinguishing the men squatting in the back of the trucks who were gripping a rifle between their knees: from their uniforms—he could hardly believe his eyes—Köves recognized them as being customs men, albeit shabbier-looking, commoner, or, as Köves would have put it, more pitiful than the customs men who had welcomed him.

  He glanced at the pianist, but the latter did not return the look: hidden under the tree, he was watching the trucks with a keen, inquisitive gaze that now as good as pinched his normally soft, doughy features. He was watching them approach; when they got nearer, he almost stood on tiptoe in order to get a look into them, then turned as they passed and did not let them out of his sight until they had vanished in the distant bend in the road.

  Then slowly, unfolding virtually every one of his limbs individually in the daybreak, rather like a genie in the process of slipping out of a flask, the pianist struggled to his feet off the bench. He flexed so violently that his limbs almost cracked, like a tree bending its branches; it was only now that it could be seen what a giant he was, with Köves (not himself exactly short) being practically dwarfed beside him when he too—involuntarily—got to his feet.

  “We can go and get some shut-eye,” the pianist said and gave a big yawn. “The day’s done.” Köves seemed to pick out from this something like a quiet satisfaction in the voice. However, it would have been futile searching for any sign of the affability he had grown used to: the pianist did not look at him any more, rather as though he had ended the service that, for some obscure reason, had bound him to Köves so far. His face was tired, worn, grey as the morning—grey as the truth, Köves caught himself thinking. A bit later (by then they were walking outside on the street, with Köves virtually not noticing that they had set off), the pianist threw in:

  “Well, they won’t come today then; they always come at dawn.”

  “Always?” Köves asked, most likely just for the sake of asking something; he was a bit confused, besides which he was forced to step on it, because it looked as though the pianist’s trek had all of a sudden become urgent, and that he did not concern himself greatly with the fact that his own long steps were leaving Köves trailing behind.

  “Didn’t you know that?” The pianist looked down at him from the height of his shoulders.

  “I knew about it as such,” said Köves, but then, as though giving an answer to something different from, or maybe more than, he had been asked, he exclaimed: “Of course, I knew, I had to, how could I possibly say that I didn’t!” whereupon the pianist gave him a surprised glance. “It’s just that maybe … how should I put it … yes, it wasn’t something I was ready for,” he added, much more softly, still quite flustered but already starting to compose himself, though even so passers-by remarked it, albeit not as though they had been brought up short by curiosity, more in the sense that they hurried along still faster, fearing that even so they might unavoidably be obliged to overhear something.

  “But you have to be ready for it,” said the pianist, this time again looking more amiably at Köves, as if he were now striking up a friendship afresh.

  “Now I don’t understand,” said Köves.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The bench.”

  “One of the best benches known to me in the city,” said the pianist.

  “It’s because of the tree that you find it so pleasing,” Köves nodded. “And also because I was there as well,” he tacked on after some reflection.

  “You got it! Two together makes it more entertaining.” At this moment the pianist was quite as he had been, a broad smile wreathing his broad features, just as when he had taken Köves under his wing that night. “And more secure,” he added.

  Köves again pondered this.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” he said eventually.

  “One still feels that way; you’d have to admit that much at least.” The pianist looked imploringly at Köves, in the way that one appeases the quarrelsome.

  “Only for them to take the other one off along with you,” slipped out of Köves’s mouth before he had given any thought to the demands of good manners. “Do you know many benches?” he then asked in order to temper his words.

  “Plenty,” said the pianist. “Pretty well all of them.”

  By this point, the bustle through which they were proceeding was starting to pick up. At times they jostled among other people, at other times being held up by a red lamp.

  “And do you imagine,” Köves, in full stride now, turned his whole body toward the pianist, looking up at him as at a lighthouse tower, “do you imagine they’re not going to find you on a park bench?”

  “Who’s saying that?” the pianist replied. I just don’t want them to haul me out of bed.”

  “What difference does it make?” Köves enquired, and for a while the pianist did not reply; he paced mutely beside Köves, seemingly plunged in thought, as if the question had hit a nail on the head, despite the fact that it was unlikely—or so Köves supposed—he had not already put it to himself.

  “The difference between a rat and a rabbit may not be great,” the pianist eventually spoke, “but it’s crucial for me.”

  “And why would they haul you out anyway?” Köves probed further. “Over the numbers?”

  But the pianist merely smiled with sealed lips at that.

  “Is there any way of knowing over what?” he then returned
the question to Köves.

  “No, there isn’t,” Köves admitted. They had reached a major crossroad, and as the morning light was reaching its fullness Köves looked around without any curiosity, feeling that he would now easily find his way: there was just a short stretch to go until he got home. “All the same …,” he said haltingly, as if he were searching for the words: “All the same … I think you’re exaggerating.” The pianist smiled mutely—the smile of a person who was in the know, more than he was willing to let on. As though triggered by that smile, Köves burst out: “Is that what our lives are about: avoiding winding up as freight on one of those trucks?”

  “That, indeed,” the pianist nodded, and by way of reassurance, as it were, patted Köves gently on the nape of the neck. “And then you wind up on it anyway. If you’re really lucky,” he qualified with an expression that Köves this time felt was malicious, almost antagonistic, “you might even wind up at the back, at the rear end.”

  “I don’t want the luck,” said Köves, “nor do I want sit at the rear end, but in the middle.” His agitation was in no way about to subside: “I think, he carried on, “all of you here are making a mistake. You pretend that all that exists are benches and those trucks … but there are other things …”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” and it seemed that Köves indeed did not know. Still, he did not let up:

  “Something that’s outside all this. Or at least elsewhere. Something,” he suddenly came upon a word that visibly gratified him: “undefiled.”

  “And what would that be?” the pianist wanted to know, his expression sceptical yet not entirely devoid of interest.

  “I don’t know. That’s just it: I don’t know,” said Köves. “But I’m going to hunt for it,” he added swiftly, and no doubt equally involuntarily, because it seemed as if what he had just said had surprised himself most of all. “Yes,” he reiterated, as if all he were seeking to do was convince the pianist, or maybe himself: “That’s why I’m here, in order to find it.”