Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

  “Ah! I see,” said Köves. “Chairman of what?” and, to make the question sound airier, even more casual, Köves bent down to stroke the animal, which in gratitude immediately jumped up at him.

  “The one that you too, for example, elected.” The elderly gentleman’s smile now beamed broadly and at the same time took on a somewhat impish look. “Come now, Mr. Köves!” he said in a quieter, confidential tone, “let’s not play with words!” and Köves, perhaps less at a loss than before, reiterated:

  “I see.”

  “We already met the other day,” the elderly gentleman went on, “but you were in a hurry then.”

  “I had something to take care of,” explained Köves.

  “That goes without saying,” the old fellow hastened to assure him, “but you may have more time now. We’re taking a constitutional.” He glanced at the dog, which, after the initial paroxysms of delight, had now, it appeared, suddenly grown bored with them and was straining at the leash after some scent or other, its muzzle pressed to the pavement: “If you would care to join us, please do. How do you find it in our house?” he then asked. Köves replied with an easy little half-smile:

  “Couldn’t be better,” saying it like someone who meant it, make of it what one might.

  “Splendid!” said the elderly gentleman. “Mrs. Weigand is a fine, decent lady; you couldn’t have a better place to stay.” He glanced askance at Köves, who, because he could not tell offhand, and he could not discern from the face which was turning toward him whether was he was expected to agree or protest, held his peace. “I gather you’re a journalist,” the old fellow went on. “I know you’re not with a paper at the moment.” Quickly, almost in anticipation, as if seeking to cut Köves short, he raised his free hand (with the other he was trying to restrain the dog, which, on spying the small park in the middle of a square which had suddenly appeared before them, was all for scampering toward the strip of wan grass). “I imagine that has nothing to do with your talents. Nowadays …,” the elderly gentleman was getting nowhere with the dog, which was on its hind legs, straining at the leash with all its might, so he bent down and released it: “Scoot! Off you go and take your poop, you rascal!” only after which did he continue the sentence he had begun: “Nowadays,” and here his face, up to that point sunny and bursting with health, darkened slightly, “it’s not easy to live up to one’s profession. Could you explain to me, Mr. Köves,” he said suddenly, turning his whole body toward Köves, “why I’ve become the chairman, for example?”

  Köves, surprised as he was by the question, and having even less clue what the explanation might be, and he chose to respond at random:

  “Obviously they trust you.”

  “Obviously.” The elderly gentleman nodded, strolling along the gravelled path of the square’s garden, hands clasped behind his back. “I myself can think of no other explanation. They trust me, but they serve someone else. After all,” the elderly gentleman spread his arms as they walked on, “that’s people for you. The battle’s not yet over, and already they’re lining up on the victor’s side. Yet,” and here the elderly gentleman came to a halt to raise a stubby, well-manicured index finger on high by way of warning: “victory is far from assured, and what will decide it is precisely the fact that they already think it’s all over. A strange logic, Mr. Köves, but I’m old now and nothing surprises me any longer,” and with a shake of the head he set off again, Köves at his side: what he had heard may have been enigmatic, but it interested him all the same, and he had just formulated a question in his head when, with a sharp about-turn which ended up as just a half-turn, such that Köves sensed his gaze on him, although he was not actually looking at him, the elderly gentleman got in first:

  “Have you seen the houseman yet?” his voice may have been dry, yet it still sounded as if it were concealing a sneaking excitement.

  “Yes, I have,” said Köves.

  “And did he not say that you should come up and see me?” The customary affability was now lacking from the elderly gentleman’s smile; it was somehow more of a gash, the corners of the mouth trembling slightly as if he were rubbing salt in his own wounds.

  “No. Or rather …,” and Köves was suddenly reminded of Mrs. Weigand’s strange hesitation when she had mentioned the chairman the other day, as well as his own visit to the janitor, about which he now thought back, he himself knew not why, with a degree of bewilderment. “If I omitted to do something,” he said, “then I would ask you to excuse me.”

  “The omission,” the elderly gentleman now began visibly to regain his previous, amiable poise, “was not yours. Just look!” he pointed to the middle of the little park, “Wouldn’t you know it, but that rogue has again found something to amuse himself with,” and indeed the dog was leaping around a young boy’s ball, then scampering after pieces of gravel that the child threw for it to fetch. “And it’s not the first omission that has been perpetrated against me,” he then went on; they had already crossed the square’s garden and had now set off around its perimeter. “Being the chairman, I ought to protest, of course. Only I’m completely unsuited to the role, Mr. Köves.”

  “Come, come,” said Köves, “people didn’t elect you because they saw you as unsuitable …,” he was slowly beginning to understand the old fellow, and as he understood him his distress provoked a smile: that was all it was about, a storm in a teacup, he thought.

  “But it’s true,” the old fellow kept plugging away, casting the occasional solicitous glance at his dog farther off as they carried on walking. “I can’t keep a secret, for instance. Then, I’m incapable of the requisite objectivity: what counts with me is always what I feel sympathy or antipathy toward, that’s all that matters, there’s nothing I can do about it.” He spread his arms. “If two people call on me to ask about someone whom I have taken a liking to, then I can’t say anything about that, even though I’m well aware that I’m making a mistake, a mistake, and in a double sense: first of all, I’m contravening the need for official secrecy, then, secondly, I’m throwing myself on the mercy of the person they were warning me about.” He fell silent; with his puckered brow and long, trouble-laden face he now oddly resembled his dog. “What I have to do is no picnic, Mr. Köves,” he sighed. Köves, more as a mechanical courtesy than anything else, remarked:

  “It’s no picnic for anyone conscientious.”

  The old fellow, however, truly pounced on the remark:

  “That’s what it’s about, precisely! Conscientiousness and sympathy! I didn’t warm at all to the two strangers who came round to see me—and I suppose they also dropped in on the janitor—though I’m well aware that duty binds me to them. All the same, my sympathies are with the person they were asking about. Yes, yes, we’re still here, you little scamp!” he called out to the dachshund, which was rushing toward them only to race off again. “I wouldn’t take it too much to my heart if he were to find himself in danger,” he eventually added.

  “All the same, the person in question can only be grateful to you, in my view,” Köves said, by now undeniably fed up with the role that had been forced on him, but not judging the moment as propitious to part from the old fellow.

  “Grateful!” The elderly gentleman raised both hands in the air. “Have you any idea how much I’ve done for other people?! And it was never so that they would feel grateful to me but so that I should be able to sleep soundly at night.”

  “Maybe it’s to that you owe your prestige,” Köves said, cracking a smile, like someone bringing the conversation to a close. He came to a halt, thereby forcing the old fellow to stop short. He was just about to hold out his hand when, fortuitously it seemed, something else came to mind:

  “And what did the two men enquire after?” he asked; his smile had not yet vanished, only become set as though it were only there still out of forgetfulness.

  “The usual things.” The elderly gentleman shrugged his shoulders. “When the person in question comes home, whether he has any visitors, the
n does he have a job, is he working already,” the old fellow would have liked to resume his walk but, since Köves did not move, he nevertheless remained standing there.

  “Were they customs men?” Köves asked, his voice unquestionably faltering a little bit.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Köves.” The old fellow, paying no heed to Köves, set off after all, so compelling Köves, if he wanted to hear him, to do the same. “Were they customs men, I wonder?… They didn’t wear any uniform, and I have no idea why customs men should get involved in such matters. You see how much I put myself out?” He looked reproachfully at Köves. “We’re already discussing things that one should not speak about, because how do customs men come in here, and why would we look with suspicion, or maybe—even worse—fear, on a body that upholds the law?…”

  “I understand,” said Köves. “My thanks to you, Chairman.”

  “For what?” the old fellow asked, patently astonished. “I didn’t say anything! But I can see how much you want to go, and I won’t hold you up. We’ll stay a little longer. Here, rascal!” he called out to his dog. He did not offer his hand either, as if he had forgotten to do so or had taken offence at Köves.

  The South Seas: a strange acquaintance

  He may have got there too early, though of course it was also a Sunday: Köves could not see a single free table in the South Seas. He had already spotted Sziklai beforehand—to Köves’s considerable surprise he was sitting at the table of a man with a grey moustache and some kind of uniform—not a military or police one, nor even anything like that of the customs men: rack his brains as he might, the only other bodies among Köves’s acquaintances whose members might wear a uniform were railway workers and firemen—but in any event he did not get beyond his own arbitrary guesswork as he was approaching the table. Sziklai was appearing not to recognize him, and it was only the vigorous shaking of a hand dangled under the table which gave Köves to understand that he should not take a seat there for the time being, nor even greet him. There was the usual hum in the place, the usual smells, and great merriment at the Uncrowned’s table: as he passed, the way regulars do with one another, Köves gave an easygoing nod, while the Uncrowned, his thighs wide apart, his waistcoat unbuttoned over his belly, and in mid-guffaw (evidently someone had just told a joke or funny story) good-humouredly called over to Köves: “Good evening, Mr. Editor!” Sitting at a table further away, in a tight, outmoded suit, with a strangely cascading necktie and a rakish stuck-on moustache (it could only have been stuck-on because a day ago not so much as a bristle had been sprouting on the spot), was Pumpadour: there must have been an interval between two acts at the theatre and he had popped across in his costume for a drink, or perhaps because he had an important message for the Transcendental Concubine, who, chin resting on her hands, was listening to him impassively, her gaze emptily fixed, maybe on transcendence, maybe on nowhere (three empty spirits glasses were already lined up before her). Toward the rear was a noisy crowd: the table reserved for the musicians (as Köves had learned from Sziklai some time before), who would later be dispersing to go to the nightclubs where they were engaged. Not long before, Köves had spotted among them a conspicuous figure, his physiognomy, over a polka-dot bow tie, broad as the moon: his acquaintance, the bar pianist, who in turn noticed Köves and joyfully got to his feet in order to greet him, so that Köves abandoned Sziklai for a moment.

  “Well now!” exclaimed the bar pianist, sinking Köves’s proffered hand into his own huge, soft fist, “Have you found it yet?”

  “What?” Köves asked, having no idea offhand what the pianist could be asking him to account for.

  “You said you were looking for something.”

  “Yes, of course, of course,” said Köves; the musician evidently had a better recollection of his words than he himself did: “Not yet,” at which the pianist, for whatever reason, seemed satisfied, as though he had been fearing the opposite and was now relieved.

  “Where did you meet Tiny, the pianist?” Sziklai asked, when Köves sat back down at their table, and Köves, glad that he was at last able to say something new to Sziklai, told him about the bench and the pianist’s dread. “How do you mean, scared?… Him of all people?…,” Sziklai’s harsh features began to crack bit by bit from the smile which spread across them.

  “Why?” Köves asked, finding Sziklai’s amazement somewhat unsettling, “Is that so incredible?”

  “What do you think,” Sziklai countered. “Who do you suppose plays the piano in the Twinkling Star?”

  “Aha!” Köves responded, whereupon Sziklai’s “You see!” carried the air of didactic superiority of someone who had managed to bring order to Köves’s confused frame of reference.

  In the “Rumpus Room,” the name given to a low-ceilinged, windowless parlour, illuminated only by the nightmarish glow of neon tubes, in a wing right at the back of the restaurant, card games were going on amid a cacophony of sounds clattering back off the walls, with slim, grey-templed Uncle André, the Chloroformist, a bored, man-of-the-world smile on his lips, was walking from table to table, stopping every now and then, behind a seat, to take a peek at the cards, and Köves was just debating inwardly whether he should leave and come back later when Alice, as she rushed by, took his fate in her hands:

  “Come,” she said, “I’ll give you a seat with my partner,” and with that was around him and making her way toward a table in the corner—in point of fact, a sort of service table, stacked with tableware, glasses, and cutlery, from which Alice laid the tables—at which a well-built man sat beside a pile of plates, his head bowed as if he were sleeping, only the balding crown of his head showing, in front of which Alice, with Köves a few paces behind, now halted and, leaning across the table, gently, yet loud enough for Köves to hear clearly, asked him:

  “Are you thinking?…,” at which the man slowly lifted up his face and sleepy-looking, grave expression to Alice—a fleshy oval of a face, were it not for this expression, accusatory even in its plaintiveness, irritated even in its wordless sufferance, and, taken as a whole, somehow crippled—whom Köves had of course seen a number of times before in the South Seas, though up till now only from farther off, when he had given an impression that was more genial, friendly, and, one might even say, cheerful.

  “I’m going to seat the editor here,” Alice went on. “He won’t disturb you.” The woman’s voice surprised Köves: breezy as she always was with strangers, himself included, the bravado seemed frankly to desert Alice in front of her “partner.” He was even more astonished by the murmured entreaty that she directed at him:

  “Try and amuse him a little,” as if she were entrusting a seriously ill patient to his care, at which, on taking his seat at the table, nothing more amusing coming to mind at that moment, Köves for a start told him his name, and the man in turn informed him of his own, in a high, strident voice, like an operatic singer:

  “Berg!”—snippily, sternly, and yet somehow still sonorously: it was already known to Köves, of course, along with the usual dismissive waves of the hand and expressions of commiseration accorded Alice by common consent, whenever the South Seas’ regulars mentioned the name—if it was mentioned at all—among themselves.

  “What am I going to have for supper tonight?” he said and then turned to Alice, clearly complying with her entreaty beforehand by giving a smile that was more intimate and ready to joke, and it seemed the waitress too immediately played along with the game:

  “Cold cuts,” she said.

  “What’s that when it’s at home?” Köves enquired.

  “Bread and dripping with spring onions,” Alice replied. Then, turning to Berg, who did not seem to be in the least amused, and maybe had not even heard their banter (his head was bowed as if he had dozed off to sleep again), she asked him in a softer voice which sounded almost anxious:

  “Would you like a petit four?” at which Berg again lifted his lethargic, accusatory expression at her:

 
“Two!” he said. On that note, the woman went off, while Berg, turning to Köves, who now felt for the first time the gaze of that distracted, yet somehow still discomfiting look being directed at him, commented:

  “I’m fond of sweet things!” in a sonorous, matter-of-fact tone from which Köves nevertheless reckoned he could pick out an apologetic note:

  “I’m quite partial to them myself,” he found himself saying offhand, and idiotically of course (it seemed that some of Alice’s incomprehensible discomposure must have rubbed off on him).

  Still, it seemed as though this had aroused in Berg some interest toward him:

  “Journalist?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Köves. “But I’ve been fired,” he added promptly, to preempt any possible misunderstandings as it were.

  “Well, well!” Berg remarked. “Why was that?”

  To which Köves, breaking into a smile, responded:

  “Can anyone know?”

  “One can,” Berg said resolutely in his high voice. So that Köves, plainly surprised by an answer of the sort which was so uncommon there, said, shrugging his shoulders with a slightly forced lightheartedness:

  “Then it appears you know more than I, because I don’t know, that’s for sure.”

  “But of course you know,” said Berg, seemingly annoyed by the contradiction. “Everybody knows; at most they pretend to be surprised,” and here a distant memory was suddenly awakened in Köves, as if he had already heard something similar here before.

  Their conversation, however, was interrupted for a while by Alice’s return. She set down the petits fours in front of Berg, whereas Köves was given rissoles, two sizeable discs, with potatoes and pickled cucumber, Alice clearly being of the opinion that Köves could stuff himself cheaply on that. Although not slow in responding with a grateful smile, in reality Köves could hardly wait for them to be left alone: