Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

Later on, though, he became the centre of endless, heated debates: Köves could only wonder at how much excitement, emotion, and passion which, lacking a specific object, must have been seething hitherto in the South Seas, nebulously like cigarette smoke, for it now all to condense suddenly around, as it were, the magnetic personality of Tiny, the pianist, and coil around, bubble like a maelstrom in the form of sharp reproofs, embittered outbursts, indeed veiled accusations and barely concealed mutual threats. There were cases where, with arguments running low, or when people tired of reasoned argument, they simply hurled short slogans tersely from table to table (by then the musicians had split between two tables, with Tiny’s supporters at one and their opponents, the Tango String Band to the fore of course, at the other, though there were some who sat today at one and next day at the other, indeed, even some who did not take a seat at all, but scampered between the two tables, perhaps unable to make up their minds, perhaps mediating conciliatorily or, on the contrary, further fuelling the antagonisms, who could tell)—battle cries like, for instance, “Tiny to the piano!” which would elicit the response, “You can’t blackmail us!,” even though Tiny had no wish to sit down at the piano, so there could be no question of any blackmail either, as gradually became evident to Köves at any rate. The hefty disputes, the most serious arguments, of course, were aired at the Uncrowned’s table, and Köves, who caught only snatches of what was said, gathered it was about whether Tiny, who as a result of the changes everyone knew about—or, to be more correct, that no one at all knew about precisely, and yet were still obvious to everyone—had, from one day to the next, been released from the agricultural labour to which he had been carted off, and whose carting-off moreover was judged as “lacking any legal foundation,” notwithstanding which he had not been given back his job (“the piano he was hauled away from”); so, whether Tiny should be satisfied with whatever work he could get, and resign himself to possibly having to play in some out-of-the-way dive or not compromise and hold out—through the courts if need be”—to regain his original position, currently being usurped by the Tango String Band.

  Or rather, an elderly, leather-jacketed marketeer raised his index finger—among the Uncrowned’s dyers, marketeers, photographers, and all sorts of other employees, as it now turned out there were also some advocates and barristers, though nowadays, of course, they were not pursuing their original occupations—or rather, the leather-jacketed marketeer corrected them with a pedantic smile:

  “Gentlemen, let’s not throw hasty expressions around: instead of “usurpers” we would do better to accept … let’s say the formulation “those currently having legal title,” because that objectively reflects the facts,” which met with prompt agreement from the leader of the Tango String Band, a man with burning eyes, whose oily black hair was plastered sleekly to his brow. The Tango String Band, he explained with his burning eyes, and with his bony, yellow hands scything the air, the fingers spatula-shaped through constantly gripping his string instrument, nails clipped to the quick—and he could safely assert that all the members of the band shared this view, could only be delighted that the unmerited vilification of a “fellow musician,” and what was more “a fellow musician of such great attainments,” had been ended, but might he be permitted to ask why “an innocent band was now being mucked about as live scapegoats” when their only “sin” was that, certainly, “they were tied by a legal contractual relationship to the nightclub,” and, certainly, did not intend to break that contract until it had “legally” expired. To which one comment was that, if the Tango String Band really were so delighted about an artist, “without exaggeration, a great artist,” regaining his freedom, then instead of continually protesting about a “legal contractual relationship,” they should consider it “their moral duty” to give up their position to the person to whom it “rightfully belongs.” Out of the general tumult unleashed by these words the index finger rose up once more, and its owner, the elderly marketeer, made the observation that although he would not like to be looked on by anybody as the sort of person who was “indifferent in respect of moral questions,” nevertheless he did not think it appropriate to shift discussion onto “a solely moral plane” because:

  “Don’t forget, gentlemen, that a ‘moral duty’ may be a moral duty, but that doesn’t make it a legal concept,” he reminded the rest of the table with a subtle, clever smile.

  It seemed his words had little effect, however, as the discussion had irretrievably shifted solely to the moral plane and carried on that way, with references to “Tiny’s sufferings,” and in response with great insistence initially, to the “innocent band” and the “legal contractual relationship” but later on with the counter-accusation of “blackmail,” and in the midst of the ensuing general uproar Köves’s ear also picked out the word “revenge”—to his uneasy surprise, most likely out of the mouth of the baggy-eyed saxophone player, who, together with the blue-chinned musician (who still reeked of hair oil), as Köves was somewhat bewildered to notice, was most vocal in springing to the pianist’s defence. Köves would hardly have ventured (nor of course did he wish to) to remind them of that long-bygone, rather unfortunate conversation that he’d had with them when he had been enquiring about Tiny.

  Yet the fact that the pianist had an opinion of his own about his own affair, and moreover one that differed from everyone else’s, Köves only got to learn at last late one evening, with the coffeehouse almost empty except for some musicians on their day off, a few incorrigible regulars, along with Köves himself, of course, who were still loitering around the place (Sziklai was not in the South Seas that day as the Firefighters’ Platform happened to be presenting their new show out of town), when the musician, grasping a half-emptied small glass of cognac to which the Uncrowned had treated him quite a while earlier, strolled over to Köves’s table and asked:

  “May I?” at which Köves of course was delighted to invite him to take a seat, having not seen him in the coffeehouse, it now occurred to him, in point of fact for days on end, although it was precisely during these days that the passions raging around his figure had been at their most ferocious pitch, as if the absence of the subject of the disputes not only did not disturb the disputants but was considered to be practically a condition for the disputes to proceed undisturbed.

  “What do they know?!” the pianist said to Köves with an indulgently disdainful smile, gesturing vaguely with his head at the virtually empty tables around the place, and went on to tell him that they had made him carry out farm work—digging potatoes, feeding pigs. “I had to get up at the same time as I used to go to bed … I could tell you stories, but what’s the point?” he continued. “I have a sound constitution, I stuck it out.” In time, they got to know at HQ that he was a professional musician, and the officers had ordered him to play something. They had procured a violin for him to start with—that being the commander’s favourite instrument: he wanted to hear his much-loved songs on the violin, and had become truly furious at him for not knowing how to play that instrument, even doubting whether he could be a musician at all if he couldn’t. In the end, they had procured a piano (in reality, an out-of-tune upright pianino), and he had to play on that. By way of a reward he would be given a helping of special rations and exemptions from some tasks, as well as having poured into him the sour local vino, on which the officers used to get smashed. Later on, he was also allowed to play at village dances, then there was an occasion when he had to accompany a third-rate scratch Gypsy band, sawing away on their beat-up fiddles and wheezing through their clarinets—one could just imagine how that sounded. He had cursed the day when he admitted to being a musician a hundred times over; even feeding the pigs was more respectable work than that.

  “And now I’m supposed to start all over again?” the pianist smiled hesitantly, dubiously. “There was a time,” he mused, “when if I could not play for two days running, I would be itching, raring to go so badly I would almost go nuts. And now?… I’d be happy not to see a
piano. I’ve burned out, old chum. Here,” and with the tip of a crooked middle finger, looking almost as though he were intently listening inwardly, he cautiously tapped on his chest as though on a closed gate that he had already been asking to be let in through for quite some time in vain, “There’s no more music inside here …,” and it was useless for Köves to reassure him that, once he had rested himself and got back to a normal life, he would see, the inclination would return, the musician mournfully shook his head in doubt.

  In recent days, the South Seas regulars had also been preoccupied by another case, likewise the subject of widespread debate among themselves, though this time engendering merriment rather than dissension. Köves learned from Sziklai why it was he had not seen Pumpadour around at all recently, and the Transcendental Concubine only rarely, and even then not with the customary schnapps glasses, but totally sober, her vaguely dreamy gaze now replaced by a slightly crabbed look, like someone who has been rudely wakened from a prolonged sleep by cold reality, and who was always in a hurry, always laden with parcels and shopping bags, which had never been the case before.

  “She bakes and cooks,” Sziklai chuckled.

  “How’s that?” Köves marvelled, and Sziklai, who—at least “until events took a tragic turn”—now knew everything “first-hand,” from Pumpadour himself, for whom Sziklai had of late been securing regular appearances with the Firefighters’ Platform, told Köves that “things have started to look up for her,” with Pumpadour suddenly deciding to ask the Transcendental to marry him, and she, bridling at the idea, in a nonexistent world, of becoming the nonexistent wife of a nonexistent person, who was not even an actor but a repairer of clocks, though more a repairer of lighters than of clocks, became so infuriated that she declared she never wanted to see Pumpadour again. Time passed, but the Transcendental showed herself to be unbending, declaring roundly to Sziklai, who “tried to mediate,” that she “simply didn’t understand how our relationship could have degenerated to this,” whereas Pumpadour complained to Sziklai that the woman was his “last fling,” and that if he did not win her hand, “life would have no meaning.” In the end, he had written her a letter asking her for “just one final meeting.” The woman had consented, promising to pay a visit at the specified time, while for the occasion Pumpadour cobbled together a device out of all sorts of wires, an acid of some kind and an ordinary battery and taped this tightly to his body under his jacket—the device being intended to blow up and “kill both of them” the moment they embraced. Either he miscalculated, or the device was not foolproof, or maybe a combination of the two: perhaps the Transcendental disentangled herself from the hug before Pumpadour was able to activate the device, or maybe the batch was too weak, or the tightness of grip, “the two bodies clinging together,” that Pumpadour had reckoned on for a detonation was missing—but in fact Pumpadour alone experienced the explosion, the outcome of which, apart from the scare, was nothing more serious than some bruising and burns to the chest. The Transcendental had immediately run to call a doctor and ambulance, while Pumpadour, overacting as ever, Sziklai said, had fainted, was carried off to hospital, and although his injuries had healed quickly, had meanwhile been discovered to have stomach ulcers, so now the Transcendental visited him regularly, taking in his meals for him, since he had been put on a special diet.

  “How’s it all going to end?” Köves cheered up, and Sziklai, likewise laughing, suggested:

  “I fear the same way as our comedy: a happy end!” because, after many vicissitudes, interruptions, and fresh beginnings, the comedy had, indeed, now begun to take shape, with Köves usually working on the dialogue in the South Seas, so that at least when he was trying to write a comedy he was not haunted by the depressing spectacle of mourning perpetually accorded him by Mrs. Weigand since her son’s suicide, her eyes long not the limpid pools that Köves had once seen them as, but now covered by frozen sheets of permanent ice, his ears catching through the walls, night after night, the stifled sound of her sobbing. Besides which, Köves anyway found it easier to write a light comedy in the racket of the coffeehouse than in the loneliness of his own room, where he was constantly in danger that his attention would wander and escape his control, with foreign figures intruding onto the stage out of nowhere, such as an old man with a little dog tucked under one arm and a suitcase in the other hand; or else he was supposed to be hammering out the comedy’s ditzy, exciting, flighty, and adorable female character, but suddenly into her place other girls would push forward on whom he did not recognize those characteristics, at most their dearth—the factory girl, for example, who had been waiting for the death of her aunt from cancer and, for all he knew, might still be waiting now. Images would come vaguely to mind, memories lurk in waiting, all images and memories which had no place in a comedy and, as Köves thought, would probably not have come to mind if those empty white sheets of paper were not staring up at him, and if he did not have to sit there facing them. In his excruciating dreams (Köves had recently been sleeping poorly, indeed having bad dreams), like an alluvium which was continually sinking only to keep stubbornly resurfacing, he would sometimes make out a word, a word that, although not written down anywhere, he could nevertheless almost see, somehow starting with the letters of his name, but longer—követelés: “demand”? or maybe it was kötelesség: “duty”?—and then, if he looked closer, was not even a word but a drowning man, tumbling around amidst the waves, and Köves felt he ought to fling himself in after him to rescue him from the current before he drowned. Then, all at once, he was seized by a fit of rage: “Why me?” he thought in his dream, but it was no use looking around, he was on his own, facing the drowning man. He almost jumped, though he feared it would be a fateful jump, and the drowning man would pull him down into the maelstrom—then, fortunately, he would wake up in time, but the unpleasant atmosphere of the silly dream would trouble him for the whole day.

  Letter. Consternation

  One afternoon, Köves was sitting at the table in his lonely room—not long before, a late-summer light shower swept over the city, so, as he had no wish to get drenched, Köves had set to work at home—and probably even he thought he was debating whether he should make a start on the sketch that needed to be delivered for the Firefighters’ Platform, or should he write the newspaper article that was due, or should he get on with the light comedy, when, all of a sudden, he caught himself writing something that seemed most likely intended as the opening lines of a letter:

  Lately, I have been thinking of you constantly. To be more specific, not so much of you as of what you read out; or to be even more specific, not so much of what you read out as of … You see, it’s precisely about this that I want to write. How can that be? That’s simple. Because I have picked up certain experiences which will certainly come in very handy for you, whereas I don’t know what to do with them. In short, I want to be of assistance to you, because you can’t deny that you are stuck. I believe you when you say that “the construction is ready to hand,” but there is something looming up between the “man of intellect and culture” and 30,000 corpses—maybe it too is just a corpse, but in any event the first, and thus the most important, because the question is whether it can be stepped over or ultimately presents an insurmountable barrier. Yes, that definitive first act which subsequently “proves to be an irrevocable choice,” if I rightly recall, just because it happened, and because it could have happened, indeed nothing else could have happened, and although it happens under the pressure of external compulsion, it does so in such a way that the external compulsion happens not to be present at the time, or is present merely as a circumstantial factor (with your permission, I would tag on the latter). It is governed by a purely helpful intention, then, though possibly also a little by one of protest; no, I can’t think of a better word for it at present than “protest,” though I don’t know what it is I am protesting against. I bow to your superior learning, but as I have already said many times, your learning lacks the colour of life, which
usually shades into grey. You see, how precisely you visualize the extremes, but you get stuck on the simple, grey, absurd motive which leads to the extreme, because you are unable to imagine the simple, grey, absurd act, and the simple, grey, absurd path leading to that act. Just between the two of us, it’s not easy to do so; indeed, I’d go so far as to say it’s almost impossible.

  So listen!

  Let’s start with me being called up by the army. I was reluctant to comply with the call-up order, in the way one is always reluctant to fulfil one’s personal destiny, all the more so as one usually does not perceive it as such. Every possible and impossible get-out crossed my mind, even including the idea of jumping off a high point in such a way that I would break a leg, but a friend (a fire officer) informed me that there was no sense in that, because they would simply wait until the fracture had mended, then whisk me off to be a soldier.

  So, I went off, dazed and apathetic like a lamb to the slaughter, and, before I knew what was what, I was being fitted up in a uniform. You can’t expect me to fill you in on the horrors of barracks life, which may be rather well known, but still strike one as new if one experiences them personally. What I might say about them, perhaps, is that it is a complete absence, indeed denial, of one’s uniqueness, coupled with the incessant and intensified delights of physical being. It’s not true that one’s personality ceases to exist; it’s more that it is multiplied, which is a big difference, of course. And incidentally, to my no small surprise, when it came to physical performance I held my ground splendidly, often in the most literal sense, which as time went by filled me with almost a sense of self-satisfaction, as though the space vacated by my uniqueness had been occupied by the soul of a racehorse, which, in the intervals between being disciplined and made to run around, spots a good breather in the collective dormitory, in the steaming body-warmth, the loosening, eerily familiar atmosphere of frivolity and banishment. The barracks town was situated in some unknown part of the country, on a desolate plain, where the wind whistled incessantly and bells from the distant settlements tolled incessantly, and I well remember one dawn, when I was standing in line in the open air, in front of the kitchen, holding a mug for coffee: the sun had just risen, the sky was hanging dirtily and shabbily above us; my underpants (in which, just beforehand, I had been performing physical jerks to orders that had been barked out through megaphones) were clinging, clammy from rain and sweat, to my skin when, all of a sudden—through an indefinable decaying stench, compounded of ersatz coffee, soaked clothes, sweaty bodies, fields at daybreak, and latrines—broke a memory, though it was as if the memory was not mine, but somebody else’s whom I seemed to remember having seen once in a similar situation, some time long ago, somewhere else, a long way away, in a sunken world lying far beyond the chasms of all prohibitions, dimly and by now barely discernibly, a child, a boy who was once taken away to be murdered.