Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

  There is no denying one day Köves realized that he was now not just reading but writing the senior staffer’s reports, articles, and essay species (if indeed that was what he succeeded in doing, about which Köves was far from sure, as he usually did not understand, and therefore could not judge, the compositions that he wrote with his own hand, indeed brain). An unbroken stream of announcements came in to Köves or the senior staffer, to the press chief himself or the typist, about which, if they impinged on his sphere of duties (and everyone except Köves appeared to know precisely what Köves’s sphere of duties was) Köves would be informed without delay. Köves would then have to go out to the locality (usually one of the steelworks) in order to check for himself the veracity of the announcements, which would concern some invention or performance, possibly the latest exploits of some paragon of production, and then to put in writing the outcome of that inspection—or to be more accurate, to put in writing what he ought to put in writing, though Köves was far from invariably clear what that was. It would not be so bad if he had to write about an invention, Köves considered: after all, an invention was a precisely circumscribed, readily describable fact of indisputable content, provided one was convinced of the genuineness of that fact and understood its objective essence. Except that it was far from sufficient, Köves had to realize before long, for him to be convinced of the genuineness of a fact, when that fact otherwise did not accord with what was considered there as being a desideratum, indeed requirement, of the fact (and facts in general); no, a fact, Köves recognized, was not something one could simply be satisfied with, and although he had heard much in the press office about the importance of the facts, he quickly realized that a fact was the least important aspect, much more important was how he viewed the facts, or rather how they had to be (or ought to be) seen, and what was more, what fact was viewed as a fact at all—generally it was here that Köves went off the rails, losing his control over a piece of his writing. For Köves these pieces of writing were a little like filing had been for him at the steelworks: the task appeared simple, nor was he lacking in endeavour, but all the same he was unable to do what presumably simpler-minded beings than he—a girl or a senior staffer, for instance—were able to accomplish without difficulty. What made Köves’s position all the worse was that whereas in the steelworks there had been the foreman, who at least showed with his instrument where, how, and by how much he had gone wrong, there in the ministry he was totally reliant on himself: the press chief displayed such blind faith in him that Köves thought it would be hazardous, not to say the greatest folly, to shake it with his perplexities and questions, whereas the senior staffer took very little notice of Köves, and even on the rare occasion when he had to exchange any words with Köves, his gaze would wander off somewhere past Köves’s head, as if he regarded Köves as some kind of transitory phenomenon that he did not consider worth closer inspection.

  Consequently, Köves lived in a constant torment of uncertainty: almost every day he would produce a piece of writing, longer or shorter, which, as best he could, would be fashioned along the lines set by the senior staffer in respect of its syntax and an outwardly meaningful obscurity, or rather he would keep on amending it until in the end he himself did not understand it, for as long as he was able to understand it even he could see it was meaningless and therefore could not be good, or to be more accurate, could not serve its purpose—a purpose about which Köves was the least clearly aware of all, of course, though by the time it had been completed Köves would be unable to decide whether or not it was suitable, because he would not understand his piece of writing, and even less what purpose it served. So that when, one afternoon, the press chief, who had just returned to the office, whence he had left post-haste roughly an hour before—averring to the typist in passing that if anything urgent or of especially high priority were to come up, he could be contacted at the office of the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee, where he would be holding important talks—stopped behind Köves’s back, casting his eyes over him just as he was toiling on that day’s composition, Köves was startled like someone for whom the moment of truth had just struck. And when the press chief placed a hand on his shoulder and said to him, albeit in an undeniably amiable tone:

  “Would you be so good as to step into my room for a minute?”

  Köves got up from his desk like someone who, after much anguish, was almost relieved that he was finally going to hear sentence passed.

  The press chief gestured obligingly that he should take a seat on the chair in front of his desk, but before complying with the tacit request, Köves, like a dying man who, with his last ounce of strength, is still thinking of his obligations on this earth, placed that day’s piece of writing on the press chief’s desk.

  The press chief literally started back.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “A totally new manufacturing process,” Köves kicked off in a slightly lugubrious tone, “that …”

  But the press chief immediately cut him short:

  “Come off it!…,” sweeping Köves’s creation into one of his desk drawers. Then on seeing the look of amazement on Köves’s face, an effortless little smile appeared in the general area of the moustache and, leaning forward slightly over his table, and in a voice that was lowered in friendly fashion as it were, he asked Köves with a conspiratorial wink:

  “A new manufacturing process? Who’s interested in such nonsense?!” leaving Köves, who on the spur of the moment didn’t know what he should do with his face, the naked, uncontrollable thing which was constantly seeking to bring about his ruin (he would have best preferred to hide it in one of his pockets, or under his clothes, and then surreptitiously throw it away on the street, as one does when getting rid of a shameful, inconvenient belonging), broke into a faltering smile, but at any rate drew his eyebrows gloomily into a frown ready to be scandalized, as it were.

  Yet the press chief now leaned back in his chair, adjusted his necktie, then with just a trace of a long-suffering smile and, his head tilted slightly to the side, came out with:

  “I’d like to read out a poem to you.”

  “A poem?” Köves was astonished.

  Then, as if to intensify Köves’s surprise still further:

  “My own,” the press chief smiled as he produced a folded sheet of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket, which once again was freshly adorned with a small white-petalled bloom, and slowly—to no little horror on Köves’s part—began to unfold it.

  Turning-point. Passion. Back to earth

  One morning, perhaps more midmorning, Köves stepped out of the front door and set off with a whistle, though there was no reason for that, the weather being overcast, with a cool wind blowing, and over the streets rose a cloud of dust (constant, yet at first glance it came merely from construction sites, with their proliferation of ruins, scaffolding, and obstacles of every kind) mingled with pungent smells, as though possibly (it was not out of the question) heralding the approach of autumn, conjuring up in Köves romantic images of bygone (perhaps never-were) real autumns of reds and yellows and crackling hearths, and awakening a whimsical longing for a light, soft, yet warm overcoat into the upturned collar of which, in one of those familiar acts, he might bury his chin—but anyway he set off with a whistle to his workplace, the Ministry for Production. To tell the truth, that morning Köves was not going to be exactly on time (the previous evening, he and Sziklai had spent a little too long weaving the still-nascent plot of their prospective light comedy, so in order to clear his head Köves had gone by foot across the city, which by then was sunk into a muffled night-time hush broken only, now and again, by an unexpected noise of scuttling, creaking, murmuring, or groaning, as if of audible scraps of a restless collective dream of those asleep behind the darkened windows, as a result of which he had got to bed late and simply overslept, though in view of the intimate relationship that had been built up with the press chief Köves could consider himself—unquestion
ably with good reason—as being in the rather privileged position of someone who would not get his head chopped off right away if he took certain liberties, provided he did not overdo it, of course. For notwithstanding the fact that Köves had barely an inkling about poetry (apart from an obviously critical year in his distant childhood, he had never written, or even read, any poems), the press chief seemed to trust in his judgement, because, after the first occasion, he read out his poems to him on a more or less regular basis; indeed, the previous afternoon there had also been a short story, or as the press chief himself styled it: “more of a prose ballad.” No question, Köves’s judgement was usually favourable: insofar as he was able to discern, the press chief’s poems were mostly lyrical verse, and Köves generally did not understand much of their content, since they were either too short, so that they had ended by the time he had started to pay any attention, or else too long, so that by the time he was able to form an opinion about them the press chief’s singsong voice and the sonorous rhymes would have lulled him into a pleasant, half-sleeping trance, as a result of which it was with a clear conscience that he was able to praise their allusiveness, their melancholic mood, their enigmatic atmosphere, and so forth. Even so, it struck Köves that there was a regular, one might say maniacal, recurrence of certain images in the course of these poems, for instance, the “fleshy calyx” of, as a rule, a “carmine” blossom which “thirstily imbibes” a dewdrop or raindrop “quivering” on it, or the fountain the jets of which “shoot” on high, sometimes irresistibly, sometimes like a rainbow, and goodness knows how else though always, at the end of a poem replete with rain, dew, drizzle, and every other conceivable kind of moisture. Undeniably, the task of listening to and, above all, discussing (or to be more accurate, praising) the poems represented extra work for Köves (the press chief would normally call him into his room “for a little chat” at the end of the regular working day, when they could not be disturbed by either the senior staffer, or the typist, and there was little likelihood of things that unexpectedly had to be attended to intervening), while on the other hand the press chief’s confidence, which, whether justified or not, was in any event seemingly unqualified, inspired Köves too with courage, so that he would now set his diligent compositions down on the press chief’s desk with a surer gesture, even if the consequent fate of those written works continued to remain a mystery to him, perhaps (he reflected once, with a touch of superior cheerfulness) the day would come when new recruits following in his footsteps would be edified by them, in just the same way that he had learned from the senior staffer.

  He was therefore all the more surprised when, on getting to work that morning, he found the press chief, the senior staffer, and the typist all in the office (they were standing in a group as though they had nothing else to do that day other than, for instance, wait for him), and then his own expansive good morning was met, instead of by the expected reciprocation, by a frigid silence lasting several seconds, finally broken by the question with which the press chief greeted Köves:

  “What time is this?”

  Köves told him approximately, and not without some misgiving, whereupon the press chief—that morning again with a white flower in his buttonhole—asked:

  “When does the working day start?” to which Köves (what else was he supposed to do?) specified a time-point roughly an hour and a half before.

  “Where have you been up till now?” was the press chief’s next question, to which Köves, who had of course not for the first time officially set off for some steelworks (in reality he simply expropriated the time for himself, employing it for sleep or pottering about, possibly even for private purposes, with no-one having reproved him so far for doing so, the press chief least of all), replied that he had gone off to one of the steelworks the first thing that morning on the matter of some extraordinarily important performance results, or to be more accurate: he ought to have visited it, but he had been prevented from doing so by certain reasons, very serious reasons at that, in point of fact the matter of his health, as he had awoken that morning to find that he felt dizzy and queasy, and he may have had a fever as well.

  “And are you feeling better now?” the press chief asked, and after some hesitation Köves considered that even if he was not yet feeling absolutely fine, at any rate it was better than earlier on.

  “In that case,” the press chief now brought out the hand that up till then he had been hiding behind his back and which was clutching a sheaf of paper, and Köves, if he was not mistaken, was horrified to recognize his own writings, all the many, many assignments he had written and handed over to the press chief since arriving there—“in that case, try to devise some useable communiqués out of this dog’s dinner,” with which he tossed the entire bundle onto Köves’s desk (for he had a desk of his own in the ministry), but he misjudged the swing, or maybe he deliberately released the bundle from his hand prematurely, so that the unclipped sheets drifted and wheeled and flittered in all directions about the room, obliging Köves virtually to give chase and gather them one by one.

  While he was doing that, the press chief set off to see the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee for the purpose of holding important talks, as he averred to the typist, whereas the senior staffer likewise informed the typist that he was awaited in a locomotive works on a matter that would brook no delay, and Köves, who had by then been seated at his desk for a while, staring at the untidy stack of papers that had piled up on it, all of a sudden became alive to a distinctly stimulating sensation coming from behind the nape of his neck—not a touch, more just a gentle puff, warm, exhilarating and fragrant, like an insinuation of the proximity of a female body. Köves hesitated for no more than a moment—it was not really a hesitation, just a cautious, as yet incredulous recognition—before raising his arm and, without even turning round, with unerring accuracy seized a soft, little hand which, in the midst of strange, and even to his ears alien, hiccuping and lonely sounds—it seemed the press chief’s incomprehensible manner of treatment must have been telling on her a little, after all—she started not so much kissing as more like tearing and mauling him, like a hungry animal would a prey which has unexpectedly come its way. And while a light arm snaked round his neck from behind, and a pliant, warm, living weight fused to the nape of his neck, Köves practically sensed with his hair how sounds are formed within a female chest and rise ever higher as tickling vibrations:

  “Poor darling!…,” the typist said, or rather whispered in a deep, emotion-laden voice.

  It still took a long time before Köves, that afternoon, was able to hold this creature who had been hiding all the while, up till then, behind a wall of taciturn industry, whom he had mentally compared every now and then to a smart, graceful, nimble little squirrel, but who, with a single act, so outgrew that humble simile that for the rest of the day Köves could only be amazed at his own blindness; nor did he remember anything else of that day—at most its length as they strove to avoid, rather than seek out, each other’s looks, like people who have already reached agreement on the one essential matter, and now all that was important for them during these dreary hours until the time was their own was to spare each other, to quell their painfully mounting impatience, for they barely existed, and even if they did, they were never able to feel they were alone. So that by the time he was able to take her arm—this was in a side street into which they each turned separately on the way from the ministry, hurrying along the pavement, keeping their distance from each other like strangers, until the woman finally looked round, slowed her steps and allowed Köves to come up alongside—the reined-back feelings had well-nigh cooled and died in them, rather like a limb going to sleep.