Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

  But this was where the pianist now came to a standstill and offered his hand:

  “Well, much luck with that,” he said. “This is where I turn off, while you go straight on. Drop by to see me at the nightclub one evening. Don’t worry about the money, you’ll be my guest. As long as you find me there,” he added with a wry smile on his big, mellow face.

  Köves promised to pay a visit. The pianist then turned off to the right, while Köves went on straight ahead.

  Dwelling

  Köves lived in a long but in other respects not particularly distinctive side street; to the best of his recollection—though his memory might well have been playing tricks, of course—there had at one time been some fairly comfortable dwellings in this district of the city. By now, of course, the houses were deteriorating, showing signs of damage and defacement, some of them literally crumbling, with, here and there, a balcony that had once boasted sweeping curves now disfigured and hanging into space over the heads of passers-by, with a notice warning of the threat to life, though evidently no one paid it any attention, and after the first few times of giving a cautionary glance up and dutifully walking round the warning sign Köves too passed beneath them with a nonchalant sense of defiance, and later on forgot even that. In the entrance hall he was greeted with a musty smell. Only a few of the imitation marble slabs that had faced the walls in the stairwell had remained in place, the elevator did not work, and there were gaps and cracks in the staircase as if iron-toothed beasts were taking bites out of the steps by night. Since he could hear sounds behind his front door: movement, a rapid patter of short steps, a shrill female voice as well as a second, croaking one of more uncertain origin, Köves did not even attempt to use his key—that too he found in the envelope he had been given by the chief customs man—but rather rang the bell so as not to embarrass anyone.

  Shortly after, a woman who was on the short side and well into her forties appeared in the doorway wearing sloppy men’s trousers and a blouse of some kind, with what looked as if it might be alarm on her wan, peaky face, which disappeared the moment she had given Köves the once-over.

  “So, here you are,” she said, stepping aside to permit Köves to step past her into the hallway. “We were expecting you yesterday.”

  “Me?” Köves was astonished.

  “Well, maybe not you specifically, but …”

  “Who’s come?” the previous croaking voice, presumably an adolescent boy, could be heard now, amidst a rattling of crockery, from one side, from the kitchen.

  “Nobody, just the lodger,” the woman called out and then again turned to Köves: “Or are you not the lodger?” and again cast a suspicious glance at him, even stepped back a bit as if she were suddenly regretting that she had let someone in who might be capable of anything.

  But Köves hastened to reassure her:

  “Of course,” and if he felt a sense of some kind of irrational disappointment, he could only blame himself: by the sober light of day, naturally, he could not have seriously supposed that he had been accorded the priceless gift of a home of his own; as it was, they had probably done more for him than they had thought—most likely nothing more than a provision that was driven by the pressure of necessity, so they would not have to immediately start shifting him from place to place as a homeless person. “I couldn’t come yesterday,” he continued, “because I arrived overnight …” Just in time Köves strangled his explanation, for he had rashly almost disclosed his obscure origin, so, as it was, his sentence sounded unfinished, though fortunately the landlady helped him out:

  “From the country?”

  “Yes, from the country,” Köves hastily acquiesced.

  “I thought so right away.” The woman did not hide her dissatisfaction in the slightest. “I hope you don’t want to bring your family here, because in that case …”

  But Köves interjected:

  “I’m unmarried,” at which the woman fell silent and now for the first time peered more attentively at Köves’s face, as if with those two words—or the way he had said them—Köves had to some extent won her over.

  “Can you play chess?” someone chimed in at that moment beside her: he caught sight of a chubby, bespectacled boy of thirteen or fourteen whose spiky hair, podgy physique, wobbly chin, and yet angular features reminded him of a hedgehog; he may have already been standing there in the kitchen door, watching them for a while, holding a half-nibbled slice of bread-and-butter in one hand, while two steaming teacups could be seen on the kitchen table behind him.

  “Peter,” his mother chided him, “don’t bother …,” and here she hesitated, and Köves was just on the point of telling them his name—in the confusion introductions had somehow been forgotten—but the woman had already carried on: “You can see he’s only just arrived, he’s probably tired.”

  “Well, can you or can’t you?!” The boy seemed not to have heard the admonition, and the peculiar strictness manifested on his face made Köves smile:

  “In that case,” he said, “I can. Not very well, of course, just the way a person generally does.”

  “We’ll see about that,” the boy clenched his lips as if he were engrossed in turning something over in his head. “I’ll get the chess board right away!” he announced and at that was already running out of the hallway toward a glass door—obviously the living-room.

  Hi mother, however, nimbly jumped after him and managed to grab him by an arm:

  “Didn’t you hear what I said? Finish your breakfast instead or you’ll be late for school and me for the office!” she reprimanded him. “My son,” she turned with an apologetic smile to Köves, still gripping Peter’s arm, “always sets his priority on pastimes before …”

  “That’s a lie!” The boy’s seething anger, the palely clenched corners of his mouth and trembling of his lips genuinely alarmed Köves.

  “Peter!” the woman rebuked him in a strangled voice, even shaking him a little as if to rouse him.

  “That’s a lie!” the boy repeated, though more as if he was over the worst of it. “You know full well that it’s not a pastime!” at which he wrenched himself from his mother’s grasp, dashed straight into the kitchen, and slammed the door behind him with a great crash.

  The landlady looked embarrassed:

  “I don’t know what’s up with him …,” she muttered by way of an excuse. “He’s so on edge …”

  To which Köves said:

  “It’s hardly any wonder these days,” and it seemed he had settled on the right words, because although the woman evasively said no more than, “Come, I’ll show you the room,” her expression relaxed, showing something close to gratitude.

  Köves’s room opened onto the other side of the hallway, diagonally opposite the kitchen: it was not particularly large, but it was enough for sleeping in and even gave a bit of room to swing a cat, the sort of place, Köves recalled, that back in his childhood had been called “the servant’s quarters.” It had obviously been designed to be darker, but since the firewall that would normally have overlooked the window—the whole of the next-door house was simply missing, its former site being marked by a dusty pile of rubble on the ground down below—the room was flooded with light; farther off was a disorderly yard beyond which was the back of another house, with its outside corridors, apertures onto its stairwells, its windows, indeed in many cases open kitchen doors with the figures that were bustling inside or before them, rather as if Köves had a view of its innards. The couch promised to be a good place to lie on—Köves was almost dying to try it out straight away—aside from which there was just enough room for a flimsy wardrobe, seat, and table, the latter being something the landlady seemed to be almost proud of:

  “You can work on it, if you wish—not that I know what sort of a job you have, of course,” she gave Köves a sidelong glance, and it struck Köves what a surprisingly clear impression her pale blue eyes made in that rumpled face—unexpected pools in a ravaged countryside, so that in the meanwhile of cour
se he forgot to answer the implicit question he had been posed (or rather not posed), so that the woman, having waited in vain for a moment, carried on:

  “It would be too small as a drawing table, say, but papers would fit on it, for instance.”

  Since Köves still said nothing—after all, he couldn’t know what he was going to use the table for (not for drawing, for sure, but then who could know what the future might hold for him?)—the woman, now somewhat put out, added in the same breath:

  “Right, well I won’t intrude any further. I don’t have the time, anyway; I need to set out for the office, and you no doubt have business to attend to …”

  “I want to sleep,” Köves said, halting the stream of words.

  “Sleep?” the pools in the woman’s face widened.

  “Sleep,” Köves confirmed, and with such yearning, evidently, that the woman broke into a smile:

  “Of course, you said already that you were travelling all night. You’ll find bedclothes here,” and she pointed to the drawer under the couch, “and that’s a wardrobe for your own stuff.”

  “I don’t have any stuff,” said Köves.

  “None?” the woman may have been astounded, but not so much that Köves was obliged, and this is what he feared, to enter into explanations: it seemed that, being someone who ran a household in which there was a constant turnover of lodgers, she must have seen all sorts of things by now. “Not even any pyjamas?”

  “No,” Köves admitted.

  “Well, that won’t do at all!” she said so indignantly that Köves felt it was a matter of general principle, quite irrespective of himself personally—as it were, in defence of practically a whole world order—that she considered it wouldn’t do for a person to have no pyjamas. “I’ll give you a pair,” she said with the excitement of one who had been spurred into action forthwith by this intolerable state of affairs. “As best I can judge, my husband’s will be about your size …”

  “But won’t your esteemed husband …,” Köves was about to start fretting.

  Except that the woman curtly brushed that aside:

  “I’m a widow,” and with that was already out of the door then promptly back again to toss a folded pair of pyjamas onto the couch. “And what’s your thinking,” she asked, “about here on in, when you don’t even have a change of underwear to your name?”

  “I don’t know,” said Köves with his suitcase fleetingly coming to mind, though only as the flicker of a memory which barely impinged on him. “I’ll do some shopping later.”

  “Is that right!” the woman said. “You’ll do some shopping,” and she gave a brief, nervous laugh as if she had been struck by an amusing thought. “It’s no business of mine, of course. I only asked … so, good night!” she got out quickly, seeing that Köves was already starting to take off his coat. “The bathroom is on the right,” she said, turning back at the door. “Naturally, you are entitled to use it.”

  Köves heard them moving around for a while yet, the exchanges between the shrill and the more croaking voice—at times just whispering agitatedly behind the door, again bickering with each other, perhaps, like cats left to their own devices—and his head had just touched his pillow when the front door slammed, and with that silence fell. Köves now started to sink, and he was dreaming before he had even fallen asleep. What he dreamed was that he had strayed into the strange life of a foreigner who was unknown to him and had nothing to do with him, yet still being aware that this was only his dream playing with him, since he was the dreamer and could only dream about his own life. Before he finally got off to sleep, he sensed that a deep sigh had been torn from him—a relieved sigh, he felt—while his face was cracking a broad smile, and—for whatever reason—he breathed into his pillow, “At last!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Dismissal

  Köves awoke to a sound of ringing, or to be more specific, to having to open the door: it seemed that the impatient ringing, which kept on repeating, at times for protracted periods, at times in fitful bursts, must have pulled him out of bed before he had truly woken up, otherwise he would hardly have gone to open the door, given that there was no reason for anyone to be looking for him there.

  He was mistaken, though: at the door stood a postman who happened to be looking for ‘a certain Köves.”

  “That’s me,” Köves said, astonished.

  “There’s a registered letter for you,” said the postman, and in his voice Köves picked out a slight hint of reproof, as if receiving registered mail in this place was not exactly one of the most commendable affairs, though it could have been that it was just the postman’s way of taking him to task for the repeated futile ringing on the bell. “Sign for it here.” He held out a ledger in front of Köves, obviously a delivery receipt book, and Köves was about to reach into his inside pocket when he became conscious of how he was standing there, in front of the postman: probably tousled, his face rumpled from sleep, in someone else’s pyjamas—anyone might think he had idled away the morning, though that was his intention, of course.

  “I’ll get a pen right away,” he muttered disconcertedly, but the postman—without uttering a word, as if he were only doing what he had been counting on from the outset—was already offering his own ready-to-hand pencil as if, merely for the sake of making his point, in the end he had delayed doing so up till now in order to make Köves feel ashamed.

  In his room, Köves immediately opened the letter: it informed him that the editorial office of the newspaper on which he had been functioning up to that point as a journalist was hereby giving him notice of dismissal, and although, in compliance with the provisions of such and such a labour law, his salary would be paid to him for a further fortnight—“which may be collected at our cashier’s desk during business hours on any working day”—they would be making no claims on his services from today’s date onwards.

  Köves read through the letter with a mixture of confusion, anger, and anxiety. How was this? Did life here begin with a person being dismissed from his job? Nothing of the kind, for of course Köves had not been working recently for the paper that had dismissed him; secondly, as far as that was concerned, he could, as it happens, have worked—now that he had been given the boot Köves felt truly drawn to this opportunity which had barely been dangled before him before it was being denied. And what if it was not his opportunity? How could he find out? The answer could only be given by experience; but then it was no longer an opportunity, but life—his own life. If he thought about it, Köves was not in the least attracted to journalism; it was possible, indeed highly probable, that he wasn’t suited to the profession. Journalism—he felt deep inside—was a lie, or at least preposterous folly; and although Köves was not at all so bumptious as to consider himself the sort of fellow who was incapable of telling a lie, nevertheless—or so he believed—he was not capable of being up to every lie at all times: some of them were beyond his strength, others beyond his ability, or, as Köves would have preferred to put it, his talent. On the other hand, undoubtedly, he was clever with words, and it seemed that this was appreciated by people here—naturally after their own fashion; besides which—even though, of course, he was not there in order to be a journalist, or to cultivate any other idiotic profession—he had to have something to live off of, and journalism, leaving the lying to one side, was a cushy job which gave one a fair amount of spare time. Whatever the case might be, Köves decided in the end, his imagination could not latch on to anything other than what was on offer; the letter had turned him into a journalist, and more specifically a journalist who had been dismissed, so he had to follow up on that clue—and Köves was by now racing into the bathroom (the hot water—an unpleasant surprise for him, even though he somehow expected it—did not work) and at once started dressing in order to get to the editorial office as quickly as possible.

  Köves’s victories

  As he hurriedly stepped out of the entrance, Köves literally tripped over a dog—one of those diminutive, lon
g-bodied, short-legged, shiny-nosed creatures, a dachshund—which yelped loudly in pain, but instead of barking at Köves, sniffed around his shoes with a friendly wagging of the tail and even reared up to place its front paws on Köves’s trouser legs and look up at him with bright eyes and outstretched pink, curly-tipped tongue, such that Köves, by way of propitiating the animal, scratched the base of its ears without breaking his stride. He then turned in order to press on ahead, only to almost bump into a white-haired, ruddy-cheeked, slightly tubby gentleman, dressed with slightly shabby gentility, who was holding a dog collar and leash in his hands.

  “A dog owner too?” he hailed Köves with a friendly smile, and although Köves was in a hurry, the oddity of this encounter, or perhaps the even odder idea that he might be a dog-owner, pulled him up short for a moment.

  “No, not likely!” he quickly responded.

  “Still, you must like animals: the dog can sense that straight away,” the elderly gentleman said with unruffled affability.

  “Of course,” Köves said, “But if you would excuse me,” he added, “I have to dash.”

  “Do you live here, in the house?” The stout fellow, without showing any change to the amiability of his features, now cast a quick, sharp glance at Köves.

  “Not long,” Köves now replied, practically standing on one leg, and the old gentleman must have noticed the impatience:

  “Then we shall no doubt have the pleasure another time.” He finally let Köves go, in his old, somewhat porously woody-sounding voice and with an old-fashioned wave of the hand.

  Köves rushed for a tramcar; it was getting on for noon, so he might have missed the “business hours” mentioned in the dismissal letter; he found the stop easily, though it was not exactly in the place he had looked for it, the former traffic island now being just a pile of grey paving stones that had been thrown on top of one another, from which direction came the intermittent bursts of hammering of sluggishly moving road workers, but as to whether the road had been torn apart by bombs, or ripped up to form a barricade that was now being repaired, or was just being widened, Köves was in no position to know. The tram—a makeshift assembly all three cars of which carried the stamp of different eras, as if, for want of better, they had been hastily dragged out of the dusty gloom of various depots—was a long time coming, and quite a crowd formed on the pavement around Köves, on top of which Köves, who supposed he ought to let a heavily built woman loaded with all kinds of bags and baggage get on before him, then—obviously in his surprise—did not resist the determined pressure of an elbow and, after that, a blatant shove accompanied by a curse, all of a sudden found that he had been left behind: it was not so much the strength but, presumably, more the will that he lacked, or, to be more specific, the disposition needed to will things, the necessary sense of desperation from which deeds might have sprung, and that—for all the difficulties, despite legs and elbows and countervailing wills—helped him up onto the second tram car.