by Imre Kertész
He had to face further difficulties at the entrance to the newspaper office: the doorkeeper, a customs man with holstered gun, was under no circumstances willing to let him in without an entry pass (Köves would hardly have said he was surprised, deep down he had expected there would be some sort of obstacle like this, except he had been thinking of later on, already imagining himself caught up in easygoing simple-mindedness at the cashier’s desk), which would be issued to him in the porter’s cubicle a few paces away. Here, though, light was thrown on Köves’s complete inexperience in not exactly immaterial questions regarding his own situation, being unable to give a straight answer to a single one of the porter’s questions, nor as to where he was from, or for whom he was looking, or actually even who he was, in point of fact.
“A journalist?” he was asked.
“Yes,” Köves declared. “I’d like to pick up what’s owed to me,” he explained.
“There’s a fee due?”
“Something like that,” Köves said. “In actual fact, my salary,” he added, before he could be caught out misrepresenting the truth.”
“Your salary?” The porter looked up at him disbelievingly from behind his desk, upon which lay a telephone, entry passes, and a list of names of some kind. “You mean you haven’t picked up your pay packet yet?”
“No, you see …,” Köves began, but the porter interrupted him:
“Are you attached to the paper?”
“Oh yes!” Köves hastened to assure him.
“Then where’s your permanent entry card?” came the next, loaded question, which would have done service in a cross-examination; a minute may have elapsed while Köves deliberated on his answer:
“I have been abroad for a while.” This statement seemed to have an unexpected effect on the porter.
“Abroad? In other words, you handed it in for that time being,” he said, now for the first time in the helpful tone of voice that, in Köves’s view, a porter ought to speak. “May I see your ID, please?” he added with a practically apologetic look on his face for this intrusive yet manifestly inescapable request, pencil in hand to fill out the entry card without delay on the basis of the ID.
Resettling on it forthwith was not so much a look of suspicion as of crude and somehow hurt rejection when he glanced at Köves’s ID:
“I can’t accept a temporary entry permit.” He pushed it away from himself toward Köves, who, far from treating it as a fait accompli that he himself, along with his papers, had been pushed aside so to say, did not pick it up, so that it remained at the edge of the table.
“I have no other papers at present,” he tried to convince the porter, a scraggy little man, whose limbs on show above the desk were intact but whom, possibly due to something peculiar, whether in his features or his movements—he would have been unable to account for precisely why—Köves had from the very first moment taken to be disabled, and what was more: a war invalid—a totally arbitrary figment, as if one could only become disabled in a war. And in order to give authentic evidence of what he was saying, a brainwave so to say—fortunately he had stuffed it in his pocket before leaving home—Köves now produced and showed the porter the dismissal notice he had received that morning: “Here you are,” he said, “You can see that I’m not lying: I am attached to the paper, I am a journalist, and I want to pick up my pay.”
But all the porter said as his narrow, hard-mouthed expression ran over the letter was:
“I see!” in an unmistakable tone as he set the letter down on the table edge, alongside Köves’s other piece of paper, with an even more unmistakable gesture. With that he had already turned to the next enquirer, for in the meantime several people, men and women, who were seeking admission into the building, had gathered in the small room: Köves had so far not even noticed them, at most feeling the pressure of some sort of silent weight on his back, even though in truth no one actually touched him, and it was only from the relieved looks on their faces that he understood how long they had already been waiting for him to be silenced and an end be brought to the fruitless struggle.
Now, though, wheels could turn, business resume; the porter was positively demonstrative in assisting all those who, unlike Köves, could lay claim to an entry permit, greeting some of them as old acquaintances, for others dialling a number on his telephone, while with yet others there was no need for even that, because they already featured on a list of names of those who were already expected somewhere upstairs. A cheerful activity, a kind of tacit agreement, developed around Köves and, as it were, against him—an impression hardly based on the facts of the matter, but more likely just on the undoubtedly exquisite sensitivity that Köves was displaying at that moment. Although no one paid any attention to him any longer, he nevertheless felt that all eyes were fixed on him, and the filling-in of each new permit seemed as if it were not an entry into the building so much as serving solely for his—Köves’s—further humiliation. At all events, there could be no doubting that without the necessary will, and the appropriate expression of that will, just like he failed to get on to the tram, he was also not going to get into the newspaper office. The trouble being that in this respect Köves now found himself somewhat perplexed: he did not know what he was supposed to wish for. As regards what common sense would have made him wish, which was to enter the newspaper office in order to pick up his pay packet, Köves no longer wanted that; indeed, it had probably slipped his mind, and to the extent that he still wished to enter the newspaper office, it was purely in order to triumph over the porter and teach him a lesson. But even that he was only able to wish for if, so to speak, he puckered his brow, because what he really wished for was something quite different, and that would have been a breakthrough into another realm, a break with all sanity: Köves wished quite simply to strike the porter’s face, and to feel with his fists how the sometime face was pounded into a slushy, shapeless mush—and meanwhile he merely beat himself up, as it were, for he was well aware that he wasn’t going to do it, not out of compassion or discipline, nor even fear, but just because he was simply incapable of striking anyone in the face.
This anger which he felt, not so much for the porter as for himself, not to mention a confused urge, possibly vanity, not to abandon the arena without protest, without a trace, as if he had never been there—that, and not a purposeful rage, is what eventually exploded from Köves by the time the last of the applicants had gone, and before any newer ones had arrived:
“Right, so don’t let me in, but then don’t quote me the rules as being your authority, but your own rancour! This is my ID, there is no other, and you’d be amazed to know where I was given it and by whom! But now I’ll take it back to them and report that you won’t accept it—that you won’t accept the ID papers they have issued!” he yelled, and he was astonished to hear his own voice almost screeching as he carried on: “In any event I have to receive my pay, and if by no other way, then they will send it via the postal service! Which, of course, simply incurs unnecessary added work and costs for the firm, but then don’t worry! They’ll learn who lay behind it: you, and your overstepping of your official sphere of authority!” With that he snatched up his papers from the table, and he had already placed a hand on the doorknob when the porter’s voice caught up with him:
“Not so fast!” at which, slowly and reluctantly, Köves turned round: so was this how one achieved one’s aim here, by gambling away all one’s hopes?
“Just let me see that ID!” the porter urged, the features even surlier than before but now seeming as if they were covering up a certain hesitation. He looked in turn at Köves and the ID, as if he were comparing them, though of course no photograph of Köves was to be seen on the document; his hand also moved to reach for the telephone, but then he had second thoughts and instead suddenly snatched up his pencil to fill out Köves’s entry permit in big, clumsy lettering, then quickly ripped the form off the pad; not one word was exchanged, they no longer even looked at each other, as Köves took th
e paper from him and hastened out of the room.
Continuation (a further victory)
Going up in the elevator—a continually circulating, endless chain of open boxes: a rosary, no: a paternoster, the name by which lifts of this kinds were commonly known suddenly occurred to him—Köves felt dull and tired, his heart was hammering, his eyelids kept on listlessly closing as if the victory he had just had gained had drained all his strength, although of course he was still in want of sleep and had also forgotten to eat breakfast. Was it always going to be like this? Would he always have to squeeze from himself such violent, self-tormenting passions each and every time he wished to move ahead? How was he going to control his emotions, and especially his sense of direction; after all, where was he actually headed? Which way was ahead? Still, Köves could not deny that his wretched victory—the wretchedness being precisely the fact that he felt it was a victory—had warmed his heart like a satin caress, nor was he able to suppress the quiet song of a vague satisfaction as though, within himself, he had stumbled upon hitherto unsuspected blind forces. He even forget to step out at the appropriate floor—as Köves was apprised by a notice board hanging in the vestibule, the cashier’s desk was located on one of the lower floors of the building—he suddenly realized that he was being warned by a sign that he should alight or remain calm in the head of the elevator shaft, where the elevator would switch over and begin its descent; Köves preferred to alight.
It looked as though, instead of the cashier’s desk, he had dropped in on the editorial office (if it was so hard to gain admission to the building, one would think they could take care that a person actually went about his business and could not wander around wherever he felt like, Köves supposed, with a measure of the scornful satisfaction of someone who has found a chink in a logic which went so far as to glory in its perfection. He found himself in an immensely long corridor illuminated by flickering strip lighting; from behind doors, which were in many cases wide open, could be heard the clacking of typewriters, snatches of voices, whether or excited or dictating articles, and a piercing ringing of telephones. His nostrils caught a whiff of the smell of fresh printer’s proofs, and Köves, clearly through tiredness, was overcome by an indefinable feeling, a dizziness, like someone visiting the scene of a recurrent nightmare. People passed him or came hurrying the other way; Köves looked at them curiously: some were wearing boots which still practically reeked of a caking of soil and dung; others, wearing shoddy suits and bearing expressions which were sombre, troubled, or determined, looked lost as they clutched sheets of paper between fingers below the nails of which an indelible oily grubbiness had infiltrated; he encountered no more than a few lanky, balding, bespectacled, stubble-chinned, hurried men with nervously twitching eyes, most of them in shirtsleeves, a cigarette stub in the corner of the mouth, whom Köves took to be actual journalists. Toward the end of the corridor, he saw a door marked Editor in Chief Secretary’s Office; on pressing down the door handle, he found himself in a light, airy room at the back of which someone was typing; near Köves a plump, blonde woman was seated behind a writing desk. Her haughty little double chin, well-groomed appearance, and trim clothing were the exact opposite of everything Köves had seen there up to this point, and, catching the whiff of an up-market perfume, he inhaled deeply, for the last time he had smelled anything similar was during his stay abroad. In response to the secretary’s question as to what had brought him there, Köves without more ado announced that he wanted to speak with the editor in chief.
“Who shall I say is asking?” the secretary asked.
“Köves,” said Köves, and the secretary leafed through a notebook.
“You’re not down here,” she said eventually.
“No, I’m not,” Köves acknowledged, “But I still want to speak with him.”
“What does it concern?” the secretary asked, to which Köves reacted, perhaps not entirely without acerbity:
“I’ve been given notice to quit.”
“I see,” said the secretary, exactly the same, though not in exactly same way, as the porter, looking at Köves not reprovingly but more with a degree of interest. “You’re the one who has come home from abroad. We know about you,” and at that, while the expression of curiosity on her face was extinguished just as incomprehensibly as it had lit up, she let Köves know that she would first have to come to an agreement with the editor in chief by phone, then the editor in chief would set a time point for an appointment, which he would inform her of, and about which she in turn would notify Köves—by telephone, if he had a telephone, and if he didn’t, by mail.
“That way it’s going to take a long time for my turn to come round,” Köves considered.
“It could be,” the secretary admitted, “but that’s the way it works,” adding that the editor in chief, unfortunately, was busy at the present moment.
“Doing what?” Köves asked, and the look that the secretary gave him was as if he had not arrived from abroad so much as straight from the madhouse.
“He’s working,” she said, “and he instructed me that he was not to be disturbed by anyone.”
“I’m sure he’ll make an exception for me,” Köves reckoned, heading straight for a padded door—and if this careful insulation and the shining brass studs around it had left him in any doubt, the imposing plate which adorned the door’s padding also enlightened him: Editor in Chief—at which the secretary shot out from behind her desk as if she had been stung by a bee:
“You can’t be thinking of going in, surely?!” she yelled.
“Too right I am,” said Köves, and kept on going, if not quite uninterruptedly, because he first had to get round the secretary, who now bobbed up between him and the door so as to block his path.
“Leave this instant,” she shouted. “Clear off from here!” Evidently she had completely lost her cool. “Do you hear me?!” and it seemed as though Köves had indeed not heard her, because although he took care not to tread on the secretary’s toes, he marched straight ahead with the secretary continually retreating from him (surely she’s not going to grapple with me or pull out a weapon, Köves niggled to himself). “Even columnists are not allowed to go in unannounced … not even the managing editor!” the secretary carried on, now with her arms outstretched as if to embrace Köves, although she was only defending the door with this desperate and, of course, useless gesture, as in the meantime the derrière she had thrust out behind her was almost touching the padding on the door. Köves was then again a witness to a turnaround that was the reward, so it seemed—always, or just at those rare, unpredictable moments of indecision, an operational glitch as it were—for extreme, indeed downright threatening stubbornness. Because on the drawn, quivering face of the secretary, who was by now practically crucifying herself on the door, there now appeared a hesitant look, then a smile of pained cordiality, and as if it had not been she who had shouted, indeed yelled at him just beforehand, in a sweet tone, albeit one still husky with agitation, she advised Köves:
“Take a seat for a minute, I’ll announce you right away,” at which she had already slipped behind the padded door, behind which—Köves noticed—stood a second door.
So he sat down. Something suddenly made him feel uneasy, and Köves puzzled out that it was the stillness: a typewriter which had been ceaselessly clattering in the background had fallen silent, and having only registered it in the way that one would, say, the rustling of tree boughs or the pitter-patter of rainfall in natural surroundings, which is to say he had not noticed it at all until now it had fallen silent. A tiny, high-pitched voice struck his ears from the same place; it seemed to be the sound of stifled female giggling, and he was just about to turn round when the secretary returned, and this time with the bland, official smile in place, as if nothing had happened between the two of them, she advised him:
“Be so kind as to go through,” and at that moment, though perhaps somewhat less busily than before, the typewriter struck up its clattering again.
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br /> Continuation (a yet further victory)
As he stepped through the double door, Köves at first saw virtually nothing, and even later only a little; in the daylight that streamed in through the wide window, literally stabbing and unremittingly pricking his eyes, which already stinging from lack of sleep, all he could see behind an enormous writing desk was a compact lacuna, a dark form hewn out of the light as it were, that was nevertheless arranged in accordance with the forms of a human trunk, shoulders, neck, and head—obviously the editor in chief. The shadow was now augmented by an appendage, his outstretched arm, but due to the deceptive perspective caused by the light, Köves could not tell offhand where it was pointing.
“Take a seat,” he heard a voice which had a pleasantly deep ring but was slightly husky, maybe due to overuse or maybe heavy smoking. Since he saw just one chair on that side of the table, Köves sat down on it, although this chair was still facing the light, indeed, given that he was in a lower position through being seated, the source of the light was now apparent in the upper part of the window: the sun itself—albeit along with the editor in chief as well, of course. And because he had no idea where he should begin, what came to his lips straight away, even though, when it came down to it, there was nothing but the truth in its indecisiveness, was:
