Fiasco (19 page)

“I don’t know,” said Köves with his suitcase fleetingly coming to mind, though only as the flicker of a memory which barely impinged on him. “I’ll do some shopping later.”

“Is that right!” the woman said. “You’ll do some shopping,” and she gave a brief, nervous laugh as if she had been struck by
an amusing thought. “It’s no business of mine, of course. I only asked … so, good night!” she got out quickly, seeing that Köves was already starting to take off his coat. “The bathroom is on the right,” she said, turning back at the door. “Naturally, you are entitled to use it.”

Köves heard them moving around for a while yet, the exchanges between the shrill and the more croaking voice—at times just whispering agitatedly behind the door, again bickering with each other, perhaps, like cats left to their own devices—and his head had just touched his pillow when the front door slammed, and with that silence fell. Köves now started to sink, and he was dreaming before he had even fallen asleep. What he dreamed was that he had strayed into the strange life of a foreigner who was unknown to him and had nothing to do with him, yet still being aware that this was only his dream playing with him, since he was the dreamer and could only dream about his own life. Before he finally got off to sleep, he sensed that a deep sigh had been torn from him—a relieved sigh, he felt—while his face was cracking a broad smile, and—for whatever reason—he breathed into his pillow, “At last!”

Köves awoke to a sound of ringing, or to be more specific, to having to open the door: it seemed that the impatient ringing, which kept on repeating, at times for protracted periods, at times in fitful bursts, must have pulled him out of bed before he had truly woken up, otherwise he would hardly have gone to open the door, given that there was no reason for anyone to be looking for him there.

He was mistaken, though: at the door stood a postman who happened to be looking for ‘a certain Köves.”

“That’s me,” Köves said, astonished.

“There’s a registered letter for you,” said the postman, and in his voice Köves picked out a slight hint of reproof, as if receiving registered mail in this place was not exactly one of the most commendable affairs, though it could have been that it was just the postman’s way of taking him to task for the repeated futile ringing on the bell. “Sign for it here.” He held out a ledger in front of Köves, obviously a delivery receipt book, and Köves was about to reach into his inside pocket when he became conscious of how he was standing there, in front of the postman: probably tousled, his face rumpled from sleep, in someone else’s pyjamas—anyone might think he had idled away the morning, though that was his intention, of course.

“I’ll get a pen right away,” he muttered disconcertedly, but the postman—without uttering a word, as if he were only doing what
he had been counting on from the outset—was already offering his own ready-to-hand pencil as if, merely for the sake of making his point, in the end he had delayed doing so up till now in order to make Köves feel ashamed.

In his room, Köves immediately opened the letter: it informed him that the editorial office of the newspaper on which he had been functioning up to that point as a journalist was hereby giving him notice of dismissal, and although, in compliance with the provisions of such and such a labour law, his salary would be paid to him for a further fortnight—“which may be collected at our cashier’s desk during business hours on any working day”—they would be making no claims on his services from today’s date onwards.

Köves read through the letter with a mixture of confusion, anger, and anxiety. How was this? Did life here begin with a person being dismissed from his job? Nothing of the kind, for of course Köves had not been working recently for the paper that had dismissed him; secondly, as far as that was concerned, he could, as it happens, have worked—now that he had been given the boot Köves felt truly drawn to this opportunity which had barely been dangled before him before it was being denied. And what if it was not his opportunity? How could he find out? The answer could only be given by experience; but then it was no longer an opportunity, but life—his own life. If he thought about it, Köves was not in the least attracted to journalism; it was possible, indeed highly probable, that he wasn’t suited to the profession. Journalism—he felt deep inside—was a lie, or at least preposterous folly; and although Köves was not at all so bumptious as to consider himself the sort of fellow who was incapable of telling a lie, nevertheless—or so he believed—he was not capable of being up to every lie at all times: some of them were beyond his strength, others beyond his ability, or, as Köves would have preferred to put it, his talent. On the other hand, undoubtedly, he was clever with words, and it seemed that this was appreciated
by people here—naturally after their own fashion; besides which—even though, of course, he was not there in order to be a journalist, or to cultivate any other idiotic profession—he had to have something to live off of, and journalism, leaving the lying to one side, was a cushy job which gave one a fair amount of spare time. Whatever the case might be, Köves decided in the end, his imagination could not latch on to anything other than what was on offer; the letter had turned him into a journalist, and more specifically a journalist who had been dismissed, so he had to follow up on that clue—and Köves was by now racing into the bathroom (the hot water—an unpleasant surprise for him, even though he somehow expected it—did not work) and at once started dressing in order to get to the editorial office as quickly as possible.

As he hurriedly stepped out of the entrance, Köves literally tripped over a dog—one of those diminutive, long-bodied, short-legged, shiny-nosed creatures, a dachshund—which yelped loudly in pain, but instead of barking at Köves, sniffed around his shoes with a friendly wagging of the tail and even reared up to place its front paws on Köves’s trouser legs and look up at him with bright eyes and outstretched pink, curly-tipped tongue, such that Köves, by way of propitiating the animal, scratched the base of its ears without breaking his stride. He then turned in order to press on ahead, only to almost bump into a white-haired, ruddy-cheeked, slightly tubby gentleman, dressed with slightly shabby gentility, who was holding a dog collar and leash in his hands.

“A dog owner too?” he hailed Köves with a friendly smile, and although Köves was in a hurry, the oddity of this encounter, or perhaps the even odder idea that he might be a dog-owner, pulled him up short for a moment.

“No, not likely!” he quickly responded.

“Still, you must like animals: the dog can sense that straight away,” the elderly gentleman said with unruffled affability.

“Of course,” Köves said, “But if you would excuse me,” he added, “I have to dash.”

“Do you live here, in the house?” The stout fellow, without showing any change to the amiability of his features, now cast a quick, sharp glance at Köves.

“Not long,” Köves now replied, practically standing on one leg, and the old gentleman must have noticed the impatience:

“Then we shall no doubt have the pleasure another time.” He finally let Köves go, in his old, somewhat porously woody-sounding voice and with an old-fashioned wave of the hand.

Köves rushed for a tramcar; it was getting on for noon, so he might have missed the “business hours” mentioned in the dismissal letter; he found the stop easily, though it was not exactly in the place he had looked for it, the former traffic island now being just a pile of grey paving stones that had been thrown on top of one another, from which direction came the intermittent bursts of hammering of sluggishly moving road workers, but as to whether the road had been torn apart by bombs, or ripped up to form a barricade that was now being repaired, or was just being widened, Köves was in no position to know. The tram—a makeshift assembly all three cars of which carried the stamp of different eras, as if, for want of better, they had been hastily dragged out of the dusty gloom of various depots—was a long time coming, and quite a crowd formed on the pavement around Köves, on top of which Köves, who supposed he ought to let a heavily built woman loaded with all kinds of bags and baggage get on before him, then—obviously in his surprise—did not resist the determined pressure of an elbow and, after that, a blatant shove accompanied by a curse, all of a sudden found that he had been left behind: it was not so much the strength but, presumably, more the will that he lacked, or, to be more specific, the
disposition needed to will things, the necessary sense of desperation from which deeds might have sprung, and that—for all the difficulties, despite legs and elbows and countervailing wills—helped him up onto the second tram car.

He had to face further difficulties at the entrance to the newspaper office: the doorkeeper, a customs man with holstered gun, was under no circumstances willing to let him in without an entry pass (Köves would hardly have said he was surprised, deep down he had expected there would be some sort of obstacle like this, except he had been thinking of later on, already imagining himself caught up in easygoing simple-mindedness at the cashier’s desk), which would be issued to him in the porter’s cubicle a few paces away. Here, though, light was thrown on Köves’s complete inexperience in not exactly immaterial questions regarding his own situation, being unable to give a straight answer to a single one of the porter’s questions, nor as to where he was from, or for whom he was looking, or actually even who he was, in point of fact.

“A journalist?” he was asked.

“Yes,” Köves declared. “I’d like to pick up what’s owed to me,” he explained.

“There’s a fee due?”

“Something like that,” Köves said. “In actual fact, my salary,” he added, before he could be caught out misrepresenting the truth.”

“Your salary?” The porter looked up at him disbelievingly from behind his desk, upon which lay a telephone, entry passes, and a list of names of some kind. “You mean you haven’t picked up your pay packet yet?”

“No, you see …,” Köves began, but the porter interrupted him:

“Are you attached to the paper?”

“Oh yes!” Köves hastened to assure him.

“Then where’s your permanent entry card?” came the next, loaded question, which would have done service in a cross-examination; a
minute may have elapsed while Köves deliberated on his answer:

“I have been abroad for a while.” This statement seemed to have an unexpected effect on the porter.

“Abroad? In other words, you handed it in for that time being,” he said, now for the first time in the helpful tone of voice that, in Köves’s view, a porter ought to speak. “May I see your ID, please?” he added with a practically apologetic look on his face for this intrusive yet manifestly inescapable request, pencil in hand to fill out the entry card without delay on the basis of the ID.

Resettling on it forthwith was not so much a look of suspicion as of crude and somehow hurt rejection when he glanced at Köves’s ID:

“I can’t accept a temporary entry permit.” He pushed it away from himself toward Köves, who, far from treating it as a
fait accompli
that he himself, along with his papers, had been pushed aside so to say, did not pick it up, so that it remained at the edge of the table.

“I have no other papers at present,” he tried to convince the porter, a scraggy little man, whose limbs on show above the desk were intact but whom, possibly due to something peculiar, whether in his features or his movements—he would have been unable to account for precisely why—Köves had from the very first moment taken to be disabled, and what was more: a war invalid—a totally arbitrary figment, as if one could only become disabled in a war. And in order to give authentic evidence of what he was saying, a brainwave so to say—fortunately he had stuffed it in his pocket before leaving home—Köves now produced and showed the porter the dismissal notice he had received that morning: “Here you are,” he said, “You can see that I’m not lying: I am attached to the paper, I am a journalist, and I want to pick up my pay.”

But all the porter said as his narrow, hard-mouthed expression ran over the letter was:

“I see!” in an unmistakable tone as he set the letter down on
the table edge, alongside Köves’s other piece of paper, with an even more unmistakable gesture. With that he had already turned to the next enquirer, for in the meantime several people, men and women, who were seeking admission into the building, had gathered in the small room: Köves had so far not even noticed them, at most feeling the pressure of some sort of silent weight on his back, even though in truth no one actually touched him, and it was only from the relieved looks on their faces that he understood how long they had already been waiting for him to be silenced and an end be brought to the fruitless struggle.

Now, though, wheels could turn, business resume; the porter was positively demonstrative in assisting all those who, unlike Köves, could lay claim to an entry permit, greeting some of them as old acquaintances, for others dialling a number on his telephone, while with yet others there was no need for even that, because they already featured on a list of names of those who were already expected somewhere upstairs. A cheerful activity, a kind of tacit agreement, developed around Köves and, as it were, against him—an impression hardly based on the facts of the matter, but more likely just on the undoubtedly exquisite sensitivity that Köves was displaying at that moment. Although no one paid any attention to him any longer, he nevertheless felt that all eyes were fixed on him, and the filling-in of each new permit seemed as if it were not an entry into the building so much as serving solely for his—Köves’s—further humiliation. At all events, there could be no doubting that without the necessary will, and the appropriate expression of that will, just like he failed to get on to the tram, he was also not going to get into the newspaper office. The trouble being that in this respect Köves now found himself somewhat perplexed: he did not know what he was supposed to wish for. As regards what common sense would have made him wish, which was to enter the newspaper office in order to pick up his pay packet, Köves no longer wanted that; indeed, it had
probably slipped his mind, and to the extent that he still wished to enter the newspaper office, it was purely in order to triumph over the porter and teach him a lesson. But even that he was only able to wish for if, so to speak, he puckered his brow, because what he really wished for was something quite different, and that would have been a breakthrough into another realm, a break with all sanity: Köves wished quite simply to strike the porter’s face, and to feel with his fists how the sometime face was pounded into a slushy, shapeless mush—and meanwhile he merely beat himself up, as it were, for he was well aware that he wasn’t going to do it, not out of compassion or discipline, nor even fear, but just because he was simply incapable of striking anyone in the face.