Fiasco (29 page)

“With your talents …,” he went on, he was all but griping. “With your knowledge …”

Like someone who had suddenly concluded his dual activity and wished to devote his attention solely to Köves from now on, he now slapped vigorously on the desk and flashed his piercingly blue eyes at Köves:

“How long do you intend to laze around here?!” he almost snarled. “Did you think you would be able hide from us?! Tell me frankly, are you really satisfied here?!” at which Köves, who had been fidgeting on the seat in growing astonishment, was genuinely stunned. What was this? Was this a joke? He gets kicked out of
everywhere to find they are only willing to take him on at a steelworks, forcing him, a mature adult, to become apprenticed as a machine fitter, and then they have the nerve to throw it back in face, as if it had been his idea to become a machine fitter? Had he not been driven there by necessity, in the face of duress? Had he not come here because he couldn’t go anywhere else? And now here they were, all at once pretending that among all of life’s boundless, rich parade of options he, Köves, had happened to choose this, as it now turned out, the very worst of all, and on his own whim at that? In what way could he be satisfied?… Köves had hardly given any thought to that so far; indeed, it had not occurred to him (he had not come to the steelworks in order to be satisfied, after all); but now he was being asked, even if it was hardly in all seriousness of course, and possibly was even expected to answer—for which he would still remain in their debt, of course—Köves felt that the entire time he had spent there was a single day, with its mornings and evenings maybe, but still a single, long, monotonous day, running constantly in the grey colours of dawn, that he kept scraping away at with his file as at an unerodable piece of steel, with its alternations of boredom and the deceptive relief of the end of the shift, and with the fleeting distraction that the girl offered, for which he had to pay with a feeling of belonging together. Köves had supposed that he was now going to live his life like that—in truth, of course, maybe he didn’t think that, in truth he more likely thought that he would only have to live that way temporarily, for today, tomorrow, and then maybe the day after tomorrow, because it wasn’t possible to live that way, though it had occurred to Köves to ask himself: Does man not live in a way he is not supposed to live, and then does it not transpire that this was his life after all?—at all events Köves was, in a certain sense, undeniably calm, and now that the department head was poking around at his composure, as he had been with his documents just beforehand, a hunch vaguely took shape in Köves that in that composure he had,
to some extent, lighted on himself, perhaps more than in anything else before.

Now, therefore, he enquired, sharply, coolly, like someone whom emotion had made to forget he was a machine fitter:

“Why? You know of something better for me, perhaps?”

The department head, however, did not seem to be put out in the least by Köves’s manners.

“Yes, I do,” he smiled. “That’s why I summoned you.”

Casting a swift glance under the now part-way raised palm of his hand, which had been resting on the document that had been located with such difficulty, he continued:

“You’re a journalist. From tomorrow you’ll be working for the press department of the Ministry of Production, the ministry which supervises us,” and he had maybe not even got the words out, or Köves heard them, when, slipping out of Köves, brusquely and harshly, as if his life were under threat, came a:

“No!”

“No?” the department head leaned over the desk toward Köves, his face unexpectedly softening and sagging, his mouth opening slightly, his eyes staring confusedly at Köves from under the cap: “What do you mean, ‘No’?” he asked, so Köves, who by then had visibly regained his poise, although this seemed to have reinforced rather than shaken his determination, repeated:

“No,” like someone shielding something tangible against some kind of fantasy. And so as not to appear like the sort of uncouth bumpkin who could not even speak, he added by way of an explanation:

“I’m unsuited for it.”

“Of course not.” The department head too had meanwhile calmed down and plainly resigned himself to the utmost patience he could muster in order to acquaint Köves with one thing and
another. “Of course you’re not suited: we are quite clear of that ourselves.” There was a momentary pause as a slightly care-laden expression flitted across his face, then, overcoming his doubts as it were, he slowly raised his blue gaze and trained it straight on Köves: “That’s precisely why we’re posting you over there,” he went on, “so that you will become suited,” and now it was Köves’s turn to lean forward in his chair in surprise.

“How can I become suited for something I’m unsuited for?!” he exclaimed, making the department head crack a smile at his bewilderment.

“Come now, don’t be such a baby!” he soothed Köves. “How would you know what you’re suited for and what not?”

“Who but me?” he yelled, even more vociferously than before, “Surely not yourselves!” in his excitement he seemed involuntarily to take over the use of the plural from the department head, even though there was just one of them sitting facing him.

“Naturally.” The department head’s eyes rounded and one eyebrow shot up almost to the middle of his forehead at the sight of such ignorance. “Look here,” he said, an unexpected tinge of gentleness creeping into his voice. The free hand which was not covering the document moved, stretching forward, and Köves was now beset with a vague feeling that the department head might be seeking to grasp his hand, though of course it could only have been his confused imagination playing tricks on him, it was too far away anyway, so nothing of the sort happened. “Look here, I could tell you a great deal, a very great deal, about that. Who could know what he’s suited for and what not? How many tests do we have to go through until it becomes clear who we are?” The department head was warming to the task, gradually bringing the colour of more briskly circulating blood to his pallid features. “Upstairs,” and at this point the hand which, just before, had been reaching forward was now raised,
fingers spread, as if he were raising a chalice above his head, “in higher circles, they’ve come to a decision about you. How do suppose you can defy that decision?”

“But it’s about me, after all,” Köves interposed, somewhat unsure of himself, though not at all as if he had been persuaded, more because he was interested in what the department head was saying, yet he again seemed to be astonished:

“About you? Who’s talking about you? What role are you marking out for yourself, apart from doing what you’re told?!” And with his face now flushed like someone incapable of containing his enthusiasm, he called out: “We are servants, servants, each and every one of us! I’m a servant, and you’re a servant too. Is there anything more uplifting than that, more marvellous than that?”

“Whose servants?” Köves got a word in.

“Of a higher conceptualization,” came the answer.

“And what is that conceptualization,” Köves got in quickly, as if he were hoping he might finally learn something.

The question must have been over-hasty, however, because the department head stared mutely at him, as if he could not believe what he was hearing, and then he again glanced at the document that he was warming under his palm:

“Of course,” he spoke finally. “You’ve returned home from abroad.”

All the same, he answered the question Köves had asked, though by now in a much drier tone:

“Unbroken perfectionism.”

“And of what does that consist?” Köves, seeming to have already accepted that he was a journalist once again, yet was not to be deflected.

“Our trying ceaselessly to put people to the test.” The department head at this point indicated, with a brusque flip of the hand, that they had exhausted the subject and should revert to practical
matters. “Consider it a piece of good luck,” he said, “that you’ve been noticed,” and it seemed that his words had a sudden sobering effect on Köves as well.

“I don’t want good luck,” he said, now in the same dry, determined tone and with a feeling he had already said that before to someone, even if then he may have been even less well-armed against luck than he was now. “I want to be a worker,” he went on, “a good worker. If I understand something, then …,” he hesitated slightly, but then he must have decided there was little risk to laying his cards on the table: “then you can’t trifle with me so easily.”

The department head, however, evidently appreciated his openness, his expression now all goodwill, his voice ringing warmly:

“A good worker,” he said, “is the last thing you’ll be. Either you leave here or you won’t come to anything. After all, you haven’t even learned how to file yet.” He fell silent, looked at Köves with his head slightly tipped to one side, then, with a friendly smile to balance, as it were, the harshness of what he had to say, he carried on: “In point of fact, we could dismiss you. You simply don’t come up to the requirements, after all. However,” he swiftly tagged on, “naturally we would prefer it if you were to accept our offer of your own free will,” and here Köves was all at once overwhelmed by a bottomless weariness which had actually never left him since he had arrived there.

They exchanged a few more words, with Köves most likely also signing something, after which the next thing he noticed was that, as on so many occasions already during his stay there, he was leaving an office with unsteady steps, without knowing anything more than he had when he entered, and he thought, with a certain amount of shame, of the girl’s beseeching, then uncomprehending, and finally, no doubt, astonished expression when he later packed his things together and left the factory without saying a word.

That evening, Köves turned up once more at the South Seas, spinning in through the revolving door and making a beeline for Sziklai’s table, where he was sitting in exactly the same pose as when he last took leave of him, and a broad smile now brightened and then cracked the hard face into tiny shards, as if all he had been waiting for ever since was Köves’s arrival.

“What’s ‘my literary talents’ supposed to mean?!” Köves waded in, throwing himself down on one of the chairs without even asking, and the smile froze slightly on Sziklai, who had no doubt been counting on a more cordial reunion.

“What it’s supposed to mean?… I don’t understand …,” he mumbled, his face still reflecting, on the one hand, the joy of seeing Köves again but now also, on the other, a touch of disappointment, whereupon Köves related what had happened that morning:

He had been handed his papers for the job at the steelworks and told to present them at the press department of the Ministry for Production, and without delay moreover, lest the greater part of the remainder of the working day be lost, and in order that Köves might be set immediately to work at the Ministry, should they see fit. Köves had rushed from one tram to another—the Ministry was near the city centre, a long way from the factory—as if he had been handed some extraordinarily fragile public property: his time, which
he had to deliver perfectly intact to its destination, taking care, above all, not even to dream of pilfering any part of it for himself. This near-missionary feeling, as if it were not him who was arriving, or rather it was him, except representing himself, so to say—that easiness had helped him through the usual stumbling blocks with which he had to grapple at the porter’s lodge in order that, ID card in hand, he should then make his way between the two customs men at the main entrance. Köves had raced, panting, up stairs and along corridors until he had, at last, found the press department, where it had turned out that he would have to wait as the press chief just happened to be dealing with something else. “He’s in a meeting with the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee,” disclosed the typist—herself busy now clattering at her typewriter, now reaching for ringing telephones—in a voice that switched to a more confidential tone after she learned from Köves what had brought him there. “I see,” Köves commented, somewhat dazed, his face but then gradually recovering an intelligent expression, as though he were suddenly sobering up from a bout of intoxication and, with some primitive instinct, which seemed all at once to resuscitate the torpidity of his original nature, was already settling himself on what was, presumably, the most comfortable chair in the room. Now, of course, it would not occur to him, Köves smiled to himself, to rush the padded door; or if it did (as it had indeed just occurred to him), then not in the least with any disposition to act, at most the glint of a memory, an almost painfully exquisite memory that he had preserved of himself. What a child he had still been back then, Köves reflected, as though musing on times long gone. When had that been? Yesterday? Twenty years ago, perhaps? Ever since arriving in the country, Köves had always had a spot of trouble with time; while living it, it seemed interminable to him, but when he thought about it as the past, it seemed practically nothing, with a duration that might have fitted into a single hour, in all likelihood, the thought crossed Köves’s mind, an idle
hour at a twilight hour in another, a more real, one might say a more intensive life, somewhere getting on suppertime, when a person has nothing better to do, nor does it does matter anyway, and ultimately, it fleetingly occurred to Köves, an entire lifetime was going to pass like that, his life, on which he would eventually be able to look back with the thought that he could have seen to it within the space of a single hour, the rest being a sheer frittering away of time, difficult living conditions, struggle—and all for what? At that moment Köves would have found it hard to say what; it was more just the sense of struggle that lived in him, of effort, without being able to see more exactly, or at least suspect, the object, let alone the purpose, of that struggle, though of course it could have been he was just tired, as usual, his intermittently failing reason maybe only indicating his exhaustion, the toe-curling boredom of the struggle. Maybe his mind was wandering, although it did not escape his attention that a woman and, immediately after her, a man hurried out from behind the padded door and crossed the room heading straight for the door—so Köves noticed that she was a good-looking woman who, through her hair and probably also her dress, left him with a fleeting impression of the yellowish-reddish-brown coloration of ripe chestnuts, whereas the man, diminutive, dapper, and with a moustache, whose jerky movements seemed as to be explaining something, striving to detain the woman, who was hurrying off wordlessly, without looking back and, improbable as it was, he appeared to have a flower adorning the buttonhole of his jacket—Köves continued to keep his eyes on the half-open inner door, waiting for the press chief and the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee, who, for whatever reason, he imagined as being an elderly, sturdy, bald or silver-haired man. It seemed, though, that he was wrong: after accompanying the woman to the door, it was the fastidious manikin himself who returned and, for the first time, cast a distracted and, outwardly, in some way drawn gaze first at Köves, then at the typist, who now
announced in a soft, impatient voice that this was Köves, “the new colleague,” at which the man, a spasm of pain flashing across his face, asked Köves to “be patient for just a little longer,” and then vanished behind the padded door, which meant Köves had seen the press chief after all, and therefore the woman who had departed just beforehand could only be the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee. Shortly after, the handset on the typist’s desk buzzed. Köves looked at the typist, she at Köves, and Köves got up from the seat and headed for the padded door with the happy yet unsettling feeling that “their eyes met and they were in accord.” The press chief, his lineaments by now fully composed, with conspicuous affability invited Köves to take a seat and, while Köves established that he really was wearing a flower in his buttonhole, in point of fact a white carnation, told him that he was delighted to be able to welcome him among his colleagues, which Köves heard with well-founded scepticism. He instructed Köves to see to take whatever steps were necessary to ensure that his personal details were placed on file at the office—the typist would be of assistance there—and there was time enough to assume his new sphere of duties the next day: “We arrange for articles to be reprinted in the press,” he said, and a doleful smile appeared on his face, making Köves think at first that maybe it was the “reprinting” that distressed him, possibly he felt it was unworthy, but he could have been wrong about that, because the press chief’s long, brown, moustachioed face, seemed to carry some secret sorrow which nevertheless, at least in this mute form, sometimes sought to emerge, whereas at other times that smile lurked on it, even as he went on: “But what am I doing explaining all that to you, of all people, when I’ve heard all about your outstanding literary talents?” at which Köves jerked his head up like someone who had been roused suddenly from a long and tranquil dream with some frightening piece of news. “My literary talents?” He grew alarmed. “From who?” he asked. All the press chief said, this time substituting
a mysterious smile for the doleful one, was “From our mutual friend; I can’t say more than that …,” yet Köves instantly guessed all the same whom he should suspect.