Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

  “I mean,” Köves chose his words carefully: he had strayed onto tricky ground, but now that he was there he could not retreat, of course: “I mean, he left you a widow at an early age …”

  “Oh, I see,” said the woman. She remained silent for a short while before suddenly hurling at Köves’s face:

  “They carted him off and he perished at their hands!” And, head held high, she stared at him almost provocatively, with a strange defiance, as if she were heaping all her sufferings at Köves’s feet and was now waiting for Köves to trample on them.

  Nothing of the kind happened, however. Köves nodded a few times, slowly, with the sympathetic, rather long face of someone who, while of course not regarding it as right, also does not find it particularly unusual that someone, as Mrs. Weigand put it, was “carted off” and “perished at their hands,” and who will make do with the dead without expecting further illumination as to the details; the woman’s tense face, on the other hand, gradually relaxed and slackened, as if she had grown weary of the silence which had descended on them, or perhaps suspected him of harbouring a secret complicity woven between them, as it were, by their silence.

  “Yes,” she reiterated, this time languidly and even, it seemed, a touch listlessly, “they carted him off, and he perished at their hands! That’s at the bottom of all this. There’s no way he can accept it.”

  “How do you mean?” Köves asked.

  “He’s ashamed of his father,” Mrs. Weigand said.

  “Ashamed?” Köves was astonished.

  “He says: Why didn’t he stand his ground?” the woman feigned exasperation with upflung hands and head, as though she were now living, not with her husband, but with a question which was constantly coming up and to which she had now become just as accustomed as to her own helplessness.

  “Child’s talk,” Köves broke into a smile.

  “Child’s talk,” said Mrs. Weigand, “But then he’s still a child.”

  “That’s true,” Köves conceded.

  “He scarcely knew his father. And it’s no use my trying to explain …,” Mrs. Weigand fell silent, the sad little pools glittering moistly in the wintry landscape of her face. “Can one explain that at all?” she eventually asked, and Köves admitted:

  “That’s hard.”

  “So,” the woman said, “Is my son perhaps right? Is it really shameful?”

  “I suppose,” Köves gave it some thought, “I suppose it is. Shameful. Notwithstanding the fact,” he added with a shrug of the shoulders, “that one can’t help it: one is carted off and perishes.”

  Once more they said nothing, then the woman exclaimed, again in her deep voice, though it still sounded brittle, like a wire which is about to snap:

  “What perpetual pangs of guilt it causes: bringing a child into the world!… One never gets over it! And into a world like this, of all places …”

  “The world,” Köves tried to console her, “is always difficult.”

  Yet the woman may not even have heard him:

  “I sometimes feel he hates me for it … blames me,” she said. “And I don’t know,” she went on, “I don’t know if, all things considered, he might not be right … what does he have to look forward to? What else will he have to go through?”

  “And that … that’s his special pastime?” Köves put in quickly, fearing that he would find the woman breaking out in tears.

  “The chess, you mean?” Mrs. Weigand asked. “He wants to be a contender in tournaments.”

  “Ah! In tournaments! Nice,” Köves nodded appreciatively; it seemed they were over the hard bit, and he had managed to divert the woman’s mind away from her futile brooding and into an easier channel.

  “He’s in training right now, preparing for some youth championship,” Mrs. Weigand continued. “He keeps saying that he has to win the championship. He has to be a great player, really great,” and one could tell from her voice that she was now citing her son’s words, with a hint of playful hands-off-ishness yet also of hidden seriousness.

  “I see.” Köves was suddenly somehow reminded of Sziklai, and he could not help continuing with his words: “One has to make a success of something.”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Weigand smiled the way mothers smile over their ambitious sons, sceptically yet with a degree of pride.

  “Success is the only way out.” Köves still had a good recall of what Sziklai had said, all the more as he had since heard it repeatedly from him.

  “That’s right,” the woman said, nodding. “He says that with his physique it’s no use trying in another branch of sport. There you are, see,” she added. “He has powers of judgement … that in itself is something, isn’t it?”

  “Of course it is!” said Köves. “Let’s just hope,” and here he too broke into a broad, one could say jovial, smile. “Let’s just hope he has the makings of a grandmaster!”

  On that note, they took leave of each other, Köves putting on his coat and saying he was going to the South Seas to dine. The next morning, after the by then routine sounds of muffled squabbling outside his door, followed by the loud slamming of the front door, he promptly got up, his first foray taking him straight to the authorities. Getting his temporary residence permit endorsed as permanent, it seemed to Köves, was a pure formality; they had just copied his particulars from the one paper to another, and there was just one section to ask him about which—so it seemed—had not been filled out:

  “Your workplace?” The question though, it was clear, was by no means as subsidiary as the manner in which it was put to him, like a conditioned reflex—ready and waiting for a notification that was foreseen and at most unknown as to its specifics—because when the female clerk heard the answer: “None,” she raised her head with such a look of amazement at Köves as he stood before her desk that it seemed almost one of terror.

  “You’re not working?” she asked, to which Köves replied:

  “No.”

  “How can that be?” In her astonishment, the female clerk may have forgotten for a moment about even her official position, her voice sounding just the way it would when one person asks something of another, simply because she had become curious.

  “I’ve been dismissed,” said Köves, and the clerk now stared at the half-completed ID, visibly racking her brains, as though some difficulty had cropped up in her work. Then, slapping down her pen, she suddenly got to her feet and hurried off to a distant desk, whispered something to the man who was sitting there, at which he too looked in amazement first at the female clerk and then at Köves, waiting farther off, before finally rising from his place and coming over to him along with the clerk:

  “You have no workplace?” he asked, his censoriously knitted brow proclaiming that, for whatever reason, he was angry with Köves; Köves for his part repeated:

  “None.”

  “What are you living off, then?” came the next question, undoubtedly apposite, so that Köves could at most have found its reproachful edge peculiar, even if he could not have expected in all seriousness, of course, that they might actually be concerned for him there.

  “At the moment I’m still within the period of notice,” he responded, and as if the fact that he had been fired now fell back upon him as his own shame, he added somewhat apologetically:

  “I hope that I’ll soon be able to find a job.”

  “So do we,” was the retort, and all you could pick out of that too was a highly qualified severity, as if his hoping not to be forced into begging or dying of starvation were not convincing enough, and he therefore had to be given orders to that effect.

  Not long afterwards, Köves also put in an appearance at the janitor’s apartment in the house. Naturally, Mrs. Weigand had pushed for that as well: the fact that Köves had now become her permanent lodger, and therefore also the house’s, had to be entered by the janitor into a register, Mrs. Weigand pointed out. “Indeed, it wouldn’t hurt if the chairman got to know of you, although”—and here it seemed Mrs. Weigand must
have had second thoughts—“that might be better left to the janitor.” Köves, who took from this only that it meant one less thing he had to attend to, didn’t think to ask who the chairman might be, or indeed the nature of the chairmanship in question, when the woman mentioned that these matters had come to mind in passing.

  The janitor lived at the foot of the stairwell, where there were two doors next to each other. As Köves approached, his eyes searching, one of the doors was suddenly flung open and a stocky man with a bushy moustache appeared in the doorway in a grey work coat but also huge boots, more suitable for ploughed fields, squelching in vivifying water, than for urban pavements, into which his trouser legs were tucked baggily, peasant style:

  “Me you’re looking for, Mr. Köves?” he asked, to which, with a sudden onset of irritation brought on solely by the rake-shaped moustache, the fleshy nose, the thick, greying mop of hair growing, wedge-shaped, low on the brow, the high-buttoned coat, and the heavy boots—though it was absurd, of course, that a person should get into such a lather by a person’s largely random and temporary external appearance—Köves replied with almost cutting sharpness:

  “Yes, if you’re the houseman.”

  “That would be me, who else,” he chortled good-naturedly: whether he had noticed Köves’s irritation or not, the janitor had plainly not taken offence. “Be so kind, Mr. Köves, please come right in!”—the effect that the rasping yet somehow treacly voice had on Köves was like stepping into a mushy, sticky material which had suddenly welled up under his feet and had already gripped him up to his ears as he entered a gloomy hallway swamped with a smell of cabbage and warm vapours—behind a door, obviously that to the kitchen, a shuffling of feet and clattering of heavy cooking vessels could be heard.

  “No doubt you came so I could enter you in the register.” From somewhere the janitor got out a hard-covered notebook, a sort of large-format school exercise book, then switched on a tiny, yellow-shaded table lamp, the weak light from which illuminated only the notebook, the janitor’s gnarled fingers, and—oh yes—a bit of the filthy tablecloth while throwing the room itself into, if anything, an even more Stygian gloom.

  “How come you knew straight away who I am, before I even introduced myself?!” Only now was Köves struck by the janitor’s sudden appearance—had he been waiting for him? maybe spying from behind the door?—and his irritation intensified to the point of nausea as he handed over the fresh bit of paper that he had been given by the authorities so that the janitor could enter the particulars in his register.

  “My, my, Mr. Köves,” there was a hint of good-natured reproach in the janitor’s growling voice, and meanwhile a large pair of spectacles had appeared on his nose, which had a strange effect on his face, making it look frailer, and his ungainly fingers laboured over putting down the clumsy writing onto a notebook page ruled with both horizontal and vertical lines, “give me some credit, please! It’s my business to know my residents … so, you have no workplace.” The wrinkles ran together on his low forehead as he glanced up at Köves over his spectacles, but Köves did not reply, and the janitor, while entering that negative piece of data into his notebook, muttered it over again to himself, though now just by way of a statement: “None.” Then, putting the pencil down, closing the notebook and, so to speak, resuming his previous train of thought, he went on:

  “That’s a houseman’s job … that’s what I’m paid for …,” and, taking his spectacles off, he stood up and held the document out for Köves, who took it back. “Not a lot, of course … one could not exactly call it a lot … but I mustn’t grumble … and one does for the residents what one can …,” and out of the murky words in the murky room, where only the janitor’s gaze smouldered like glowing embers—Köves supposed, eagerly, almost peremptorily: it was most likely his disturbed senses that were making him see it in that way, for in reality it could only have been the little lamp flickering on the table that was being reflected in those eyes—Köves sensed a demand of some sort beginning to assert itself ever more explicitly, a demand that he soon understood and one to which he would, Köves decided, under no circumstances give in. But while he was coming to that decision, his hand, as if it were not even his own, was already breaking free and—Köves noticed to his great astonishment—reaching into his pocket, digging out a bank note, and pressing it into the janitor’s palm, whereas the janitor, just incidentally as it were, as if this too were tied up with the conversation, accepted it and thrust it into his baggy trousers:

  “Why thank you, Mr. Köves,” he said, and at this point an indulgent cordiality crept into the rusty voice, “Honestly, that wasn’t my reason for saying it. Nice coat you have there.” He immediately perked up. “It seems to be made of a good material,” and, before Köves knew what was going on or could move, the gnarled, yellowed fingers were already pawing his overcoat. “Foreign by any chance?”

  “Right, foreign,” said Köves, as if he were only telling the truth out of disdain.

  “Do you regularly get parcels from abroad perhaps?” the janitor inquired, and Köves, who had meanwhile come to his senses, now replied with unconcealed sarcasm:

  “If I do, you’ll know soon enough from the postman!” And with that he was on his way to the door when the janitor’s response—

  “My, my, Mr. Köves, so what if I do? It’s not a secret, or is it?”—caught up with him more or less on the staircase, and as he made his way up from the basement the chuckling also gradually faded away, so that all he carried with him, on the folds of the overcoat that had been praised shortly before, was the cabbage smell.

  The man with the dog

  One noon—or might it not rather have been getting on for evening? Since arriving there, time seemed to have become somewhat disjointed, with his having left the old tempo behind but not yet having found his way into the swing of things in the new place, so that it was as if it were all the same to him what the time was, the part of the day, and even what day, obviously as a result of the lazy way of life, which would change as soon as he found work and it imposed order on him, although, he mused, might it not be all the same to him precisely for that reason?—Köves set off at an easy pace to the South Seas. No doubt it was a Sunday, with an unwonted sluggishness reigning over the city; sounds of jollity could even be picked out here and there, the sleepy stillness broken by the racket of children, a strident burst of music and the odours of Sunday lunches streaming from open windows; only the ruins looked even more inconsolable than at other times—maybe the absence of the otherwise constant sound of hammering and the sight of workers scrambling around on buildings—as if they were unable either to be built up or destroyed and now wished to stay there forever the way they were, stubbornly holding out in the midst of perpetual decay as it were, though tomorrow, of course, the hammers would ring out anew, goods trucks do their rounds, people yell. Peter had turned up in the room already early that morning, when Köves was still in bed, and the boy had wanted to set out the chessboard on the bedspread, on his stomach, but Köves told him in no uncertain terms that he was unwilling to play. “See if I care,” the boy said in response. “I was fooled by you once, but you know diddley-squat about the game. And anyway, I hate you,” he added from the doorway, leaving Köves hoping that the hatred would spare him thereafter from playing chess. Later on, Köves went for a walk, looking around the city—having a bite to eat at a stand-up buffet en route, whatever they were selling as long as it was cheap—and looking at shop windows in particular, at least those that were not boarded up. He had already procured for himself one thing and another, but shopping did not proceed anything like as easy as Köves had, if not imagined, in any case would have liked; a crowded throng packed most of the shops, and in many cases he was greeted by a line of people stretching outside the doors, and by the time he had reached a counter it turned out that he had to buy something other than what he had wanted to buy, in the best case at least something similar: a nightshirt instead of pyjamas, for example, but eve
n then only in a much larger size than his, more of a fit for some potbellied giant, although Köves couldn’t stand nightshirts, so in order that he would be able to return her husband’s pyjamas to Mrs. Weigand, he chose to sleep in the buff, though he bought a nightshirt nevertheless, and—with exchange in mind—not just one but two, for when he was about to leave he had spotted an unaccountable dash of joy in the saleswoman’s expression which suggested, Köves reasoned, that nightshirts must be a scarce commodity there, so it would not be smart to pass up this good fortune; in the end, it emerged that Mrs. Weigand did not insist on hanging on to the pyjamas at all, as she herself had no use for them and they were, as yet, too big for Peter.

  He was already at the corner when the sounds of wheezing and a hurried scrabbling of the claws of tiny legs struck his ears, and as he turned the corner a little dog flew like a brown projectile, hurled with great force, at his lap, flinging its tiny head and its shiny nose this way and that in its ecstasy, sniffing, lapping with its lolling tongue at Köves’s hands, fixing its sparkling button-eyes expectantly on Köves, then from farther away a porously woody-sounding voice blared:

  “Here this instant, you little rascal!” It was the elderly gentleman and his dachshund, whom Köves had run across not long before. “A shameless flatterer, you are, nothing else!” the elderly gentleman’s grouching sounded more like an expression of affection as he bent down and attached the leash in his hand to the dog’s collar. “There’s no escaping him once he’s formed a liking for someone,” he continued, apparently still grumbling but in truth with barely concealed pride. “But it’s rare for him to form a liking for a person at first sight, take it from me, Mr. Köves!”

  “I see you already know who I am,” said Köves, somewhat surprised, “so there’s no need for me to introduce myself.”

  “Certainly I know who you are.” The elderly gentleman was jerked vigorously by the end of the leash, as the dog suddenly pulled away in his excitement so as to bless a house wall with a cocked rear leg. “In a certain sense it’s my duty to know. Keep still now!” he scolded the little dog, which was again leaping around like crazy, getting entangled with their legs. “I’m the chairman, you see.” He again turned his head with its fine white hair, ruddy-cheeked face and amiable smile toward Köves.