by Imre Kertész
“I had to see you.”
“Very sensible of you,” could be heard from behind the writing desk. A tiny flame flickered then shortly after Köves heard this from behind a rising light cloud of blue-tinged smoke which within seconds had scattered in the light:
“My door is open to all,” and on hearing this firmly resonant declaration the whole obstacle race that Köves had run in order to get to this room melted into thin air, like the cigarette smoke just before, and Köves was surprised to find something melting inside him into an obscure sense of gratitude which suddenly filled him with confidence.
It also coloured his voice:
“Because I’ve been given notice of dismissal”—an apology, almost a smile was hidden in that, as when men talk over among themselves some nonsense which has occurred.
“I know,” Köves heard. “How can I be of assistance?”
“I’ve lost my bread and butter,” Köves explained.
“Your bread and butter?” came back, somewhat shocked, at least to Köves’s ears.
“What I mean is that I don’t have anything to live off of.” However much Köves might be embarrassed by his own words, it seemed he would have to speak clearly if he wished to be understood.
“I see, so that’s what this is about.” Now it seemed as if there was a touch of underlying impatience in the voice.
“Yes,” said Köves. “I have to make a living, after all.”
“Naturally, you have to make a living; we all have to make a living.” The head moved about while it was speaking, so that Köves was now slowly able to make out the outline of a jutting chin and a forceful, imperious nose. “But then, ultimately it’s not a matter of prime importance.”
“It becomes a matter of prime importance if you have nothing to live off of,” said Köves.
“Everyone in our country makes a living,” and now Köves sensed in the voice something final, brooking no denial, as if he had been put in his place. “As far as your dismissal goes,” the editor in chief went on, now with a somewhat more expansive intonation, “we weighed it up meticulously. To tell you the truth, we can’t really see how we could make use of you. Although,” and here the voice seemed to hesitate, but then continued all the same, “I won’t deny that we received a serious recommendation on your behalf.”
“From where?” the question seemed to slip out of Köves, but no doubt over-hastily, because it received no answer.
“We are not familiar with your work,” the editor in chief continued. “Besides, so I hear, you have spent a lengthy spell abroad; you may not even be acquainted with the line our paper takes.”
“But then,” said Köves, “it’s not just a matter of the line. With a paper,” Köves became quite animated, “other types of work can be found.”
“You’re making me curious,” he heard the editor in chief say, a remark that—not exactly hostile, but not too friendly either—again unsettled Köves. “What are you thinking of?”
“What indeed?” Köves tried to collect his thoughts as a suspicion was aroused in him that he was walking into a trap. “I can formulate proper grammatical sentences. I’m skilled at rounding out a story and supplying a punch line … maybe,” he added with a modest, self-deprecating smile, as if he wished to avoid the appearance of bragging, “well anyway, perhaps I also have some style.”
“So.” The word rang curtly, but Köves was unable to pick out any expression on the face haloed by the incoming rays from behind. “So in your view,” the voice established rather than enquired, “a journalist’s work consists of constructing proper grammatical sentences and rounding suitably pointed stories …”
“At all events,” a strange defiance awoke now in Köves as in someone who knows he is right and has to defend his standpoint: “At all events journalism can’t exist without that,” and, without having a clue why, a recollection of how the pianist had talked that night about his numbers suddenly flashed across his mind.
“So.” This now sounded even more curt and more assertive than before. Then, after a brief pause, Köves heard the following question, slow and precisely articulated:
“And you have no credo … no persuasion?” and Köves suddenly felt like someone sizing up the depths of a chasm—and quite irrationally, too, since if he were going to jump, he would do better to jump with his eyes closed.
“None,” he said. And then he almost shouted once again into the deafening silence which followed that word: “None!… How could I have any persuasion when I have never once been persuaded about anything at all! Life is not a source of faith, after all, life is … I don’t know what, but life is something else …”
He was soon interrupted:
“You’re not familiar with the life we lead.”
“I’d like to work, and then I shall get to know it,” Köves said, in a low voice now, almost longingly.
“Well, work!” came back the exhortation.
“But I’ve been dismissed,” Köves complained, despondently.
“You don’t have to be with us to work,” the voice exhorted further.
“But I don’t know how to do anything else.” Köves bowed his head, sensing he was behaving like a beggar.
“You’ll learn: our factories are waiting with open gates for anyone who wishes to work!” chimed the voice, and Köves lifted his head again: the recognition, like a judgement, filled him with a calm, dull weariness, but in it he somehow regained his keen sense of pride.
“So, that’s what you intend for me,” he said slowly, almost whispering, searching in vain with his groping gaze for the purchase of any sort of face, as long as it was visible in the light.
“We don’t intend anything at all for you,” came back from over there. “That’s just your misconception: it’s up to you to find your alternatives.” Then, seeming to make do with that for his lecturing, the editor in chief’s voice turned warmer, almost congenial: “Work, get to know life, open up your eyes and ears, accumulate experiences. Don’t imagine we have given up on you and your talent. This door,” the arm swung straight out and pointed to somewhere behind Köves, obviously the door, “This door, you’ll see, will open to you yet again.”
“That may be.” Köves jumped up: with his loss of hope (if there had been any) came that of his patience, his patience for everything which, being neither a constraint on him nor his freedom, was no longer of interest. “That may be, but I won’t be stepping through it!” After which he was again outside in the corridor, he himself didn’t quite know how, and with the abatement of his excitement while the paternoster sank downwards with him, obviously either for no reason, or just as a reaction to the excitements he had endured, but so unexpectedly he was almost frightened by it, he was veritably overwhelmed by a sense of relief, like some indescribable happiness. Everything had happened differently from the way he had wanted, and yet—probably only through being in the sort of worked-up state which cancels shades—he nevertheless felt he had got what he wanted. As if he had stood his ground for something, defended something—but what? The word occurred to Köves: honour. But then, he asked himself in perplexed amazement, like someone stumbling over an unforeseen obstacle, what was his honour?
South Seas
At the cashier’s desk Köves was paid out what was owed him without a word—a laughable amount, although of course he had not yet informed himself about the prices, so his grumbling might just have been a sudden onrush of an employee’s instincts, the eternal craving which always feels that whatever is tossed at it is a tidbit, swallows it with an unappeased muttering, and then is already opening his mouth wide for the next morsel, never asking whether even the previous one had been earned: as far as Köves was concerned, he had not put in a stroke of work for it, and as a matter of fact they had only made a payment to him so that he would not be in their way for two weeks, nor be able to pester them with his petty worries even that long, while they saw to it that they should also stamp his entry permit, for without that he would never
be able to step out of the front entrance; and on getting out onto the corridor he passed a man who, Köves remembered, had happened to be picking up some money immediately before him at the cashier’s desk and was just in the process of counting the bank notes yet again, for he too was visibly not very satisfied with the amount. As Köves went past, without raising his head, the man asked:
“They’ve kicked you out too?”
“Yep,” said Köves.
“But why?” the man asked, though apparently more abstractedly than out of genuine curiosity, as he stuffed the money into his pocket.
“I don’t know.” Köves shrugged his shoulders, perhaps a bit irritated, feeling sick and tired of his own affairs. “I wasn’t even here,” he threw out so as not to look grudging with his words.
“Aha!” said the other, a young man of roughly the same build as Köves, and now they trudged together down the long corridor toward the paternoster. “They sent you off into the country, and by the time you returned,
the notice of dismissal was waiting for you, right?”
“Right,” Köves admitted.
“That’s what they usually do,” the other nodded. “We got out of it rather well,” he added, as he and Köves stepped together into one of the descending boxes, which carried on sinking with them as its load.
“Why?” A spark of interest was kindled in Köves. “Have they kicked you out as well?”
“Darn right!” said the other.
“And why was that?” Köves asked.
“My face doesn’t fit.” Now it was his turn to shrug shoulders, just like Köves before. They were now in the entrance lobby. They handed in their permits to the customs man, then stepped out onto the street; the sunlight, the traffic, even the scanty, small-town bustle worked on Köves, with his all-accommodating and equalizing indifference, rather like an act of kindness. “These recent changes …,” the previous voice caught his ear, and Köves snatched up his head in surprise: he had already forgotten that he was not alone.
“What changes?” he asked, more just out of politeness, as he had a shrewd idea in advance that the answer would be exactly what it was:
“Can anyone know?”
“No, they can’t.” Köves nodded, feeling that he was taking part with obligatory automatism in some ceremony then in fashion.
But then something came to mind, this time a genuine question, touching on the heart of the matter, which he really ought to have addressed to himself but which he posed to the other all the same:
“So, what are you going to do now?”
“What?” Köves’s new acquaintance nonchalantly shrugged his shoulders. “I’m going to have lunch,” and the self-explanatory announcement somehow resonated with Köves and cheered him up, like someone who, after a lengthy exile, feels he is slowly starting to return to the world of human society. “Come with me, if you can spare the time,” Köves’s new acquaintance went on. Köves could now see that he had dark hair, a bulging forehead, and a coarse yet, on the whole, still pleasant face which seemed almost to crack when he laughed, as if a boy were suddenly sticking out his head among the prematurely hardened features. “We’ll go to the South Seas, you can always get something there,” and if before he had merely cheered up, Köves now unreservedly rejoiced, because he gathered that what was in question was a restaurant, and he realized that this was the very longing which was lurking in him: to sit down in a restaurant and to eat and drink his fill without a care, even if it were to be for the last time in his life, with a good friend.
“Is it far?” he showed his impatience.
“Haven’t you been in the South Seas before?” his new friend was genuinely astounded. “Well then, it’s time you got to know it,” at which they set off.
Washing of waves
A full belly, his thirst quenched with alcohol, even if it was weak, third-rate beer, the dense fug and the snatches of voices which would be cast up out of the constant buzz in the South Seas lulled Köves so completely that it was as if he were rocking on the backs of waves, at a detached remoteness from all the more solid certainties which were showing only indistinctly from a distance. When he had drifted in through the old-fashioned, glazed revolving door, it suddenly seemed to Köves that he was both acquainted with the place—a vast barn of a room, divided up into two or maybe more interconnecting spaces—and then again not, but at all events time had not passed by even the South Seas without leaving its mark: the velvet drapery showed signs of wear, a solitary piano on the podium, forlorn and shrouded in a cover—the whole thing gave the overall picture of a diner and coffee bar, gambling den and daytime refuge which had started to go downhill, where his new friend, Sziklai—on hearing the name something flashed through Köves’s mind, nothing more than a vague memory in a world where the vagueness of memories vies with that of the present—plainly felt completely at home, so Köves relinquished all initiative to him as being someone who wanted, for the time being at any rate, release from a burden that could hardly be dragged a step further: himself. He was again overcome by tiredness, so he only registered events from the periphery of his consciousness as it were. His steps were initially hurried and then more hesitant as they penetrated the interior of the place, no doubt its hub, so to speak—Köves had that impression. They were looking for someone; then the waitress who hastened to meet them, neither young nor old, and who was given a tragic air by the two deep furrows which ran from her nose to her chin, in diametric contrast to her words and the casual gesture with which she pointed to an empty table covered by a tablecloth of a somewhat suspect shade.
“My editor friends should park their carcasses there,” she said, from which it appeared that she already knew Sziklai well. Then there was their strange dialogue: Sziklai ordered fried fillet of pork for the two of them, at which the waitress asked:
“Do the gentlemen like half-cooked gristle?” Sziklai thereupon ordered Wiener schnitzel, at which the waitress, closing her eyes and pursing her lips, asked him:
“Tell me, in all honesty, when and where did you last see a Wiener schnitzel?” At this, Sziklai, seemingly exasperated, started to pick a quarrel:
“But it’s here, on the menu!” he shouted.
“Of course it’s there,” the waitress retorted. “What kind of a menu would it look like without Wiener schnitzel?”
It struck Köves that they were playing some kind of legpulling parlour game with each other, to which distant shouts and the waitress’s sudden impatience put an end. “Enough!” she said. “Our charming guests are already being kept waiting at other tables. You’ll get potato hot-pot!”
And with that she was off, while Sziklai, his features suddenly cracking and the boyish smile surfacing among them, enlightened Köves:
“That’s Alice, the waitress,” which Köves cheerfully noted. That cheerfulness switched over to frank enthusiasm when it turned out that the potato hot-pot was actually not potato hot-pot, and under the mixture of potatoes and eggs Köves’s probing fork prodded a fine slice of meat, whereupon he was just about to open his mouth when Sziklai intimated by vigorous head-shaking that he ought to keep his mouth shut (clearly they were being accorded a privilege of some kind). “You can always count on Alice,” was all Köves was able to get out of Sziklai.
That was not the case with the other fidgeting, gesticulating or, to the contrary, sluggish or even mutely absorbed customers hovering near at hand or farther away in the sweltering half-light, about whom Sziklai seemed to know everything, with Köves taking in only a fraction of what he said about them. Regarding a fat, balding man, whose sickly-coloured face, despite the occasional mopping with a handkerchief as big as a bedsheet, was constantly glistening with perspiration and whose table seemed to be a sort of focal point, at which people arrived in a hurry, then settled for a while before jumping up again, whereas others stayed there for longer exchanges of ideas, a person whom Sziklai himself also greeted (the bald man cordially returned the nod), Köves found out that he was the �
�Uncrowned,” and although who gave him that nickname was unclear, its import was easy to explain because he was the uncrowned king there, with half the coffee bar working just for him, Sziklai recounted.
“How come?” Köves enquired.
“Because,” said Sziklai, “the chap was actually pensioned off as unfit for service.” And when Köves asked what kind of service he had been engaged in previously, Sziklai responded: “What do you think, then?” and although Köves didn’t think anything, being simply too lazy to think anything at all, nevertheless, pretending to take the hint, he dropped in an “Aha!”, and it seemed that was precisely the answer expected from him. Now, he continued, “taking into consideration his previous merits” (and here Sziklai gave Köves a meaningful wink), the Uncrowned was granted permission to vend scarves and shawls to peasant women at provincial markets, as well as to take photographs of peasants and sell them the pictures. The permit was originally made out in the Uncrowned’s name, authorizing him alone to sell and to take photographs. But then, for one thing, there was so much to do—peasants, normally the most mistrustful of people, Sziklai related, virtually turn into kids the moment someone wants to take a family photograph of them, so much so that it could happen there wasn’t even any film in the camera (given that it wasn’t always possible to obtain film in the shops), so they clicked the machine with an empty cartridge, took the deposit that had been agreed on, and of course the peasants subsequently never received the pictures that had been “taken,” while the name and address given by the photographer, naturally, proved false—so much work that one man couldn’t possibly get through it, besides which the Uncrowned was a severe diabetic and had heart disease. Also, there were plenty of people who needed “papers,” said Sziklai. That was how they would come to be working for the Uncrowned: one way or another, he would obtain an official document for them, which stated that they were working for a non-profit company. That way they would not be open to charges of workshyness or sponging, nor could he be called to account for giving employment to what was maybe a nationwide network of agents. Because of course nobody, not even the Uncrowned, could give employment to any agents, could they; agents, on the other hand, could never work as agents without appropriate papers which certified they were not in fact agents, so they were therefore dependant on each other, said Sziklai, and the Uncrowned was respected not just as a boss but as their benefactor.
