Fiasco (30 page)

“Don’t tell me you’re not pleased about it?” Sziklai laughed out loud, but whether because he wanted to avoid giving a straight answer, or because he was curious about something else, Köves asked instead:

“So, you know him?”

“Certainly I know him,” Sziklai replied, his eyebrows raised in amazement, as if surprised at Köves’s ignorance. “All the same …,” he carried on but then broke off what he had to say so as to order two beers, no: “two shots” in celebration of their reunion, from Alice who had hurried up to their table and, for her part, likewise shared their delight, commenting that “We’ve been missing our Mr. Editor badly”—“All the same …,” Sziklai then picked up the thread of their conversation again, “How do you think you got out of the meatgrinder into such a classy job?”

“How?” Köves inquired curiously, but like someone already harbouring forebodings.

“By my organising it for you,” Sziklai wised him up.

“You?!” Köves was astonished. “You mean it wasn’t an arrangement from higher up?” He gave himself away, like a child who, driven by his own curiosity, starts taking a doll apart in order to see what is speaking in its belly; and having got going, he also related to Sziklai how he had been dismissed from the steelworks, and Sziklai laughed so hard that a tiny tear welled up in one eye and lodged, twinkling, in the thicket of wrinkles which had formed at the corner of the eye.

“An arrangement from higher up!” he choked. “Well of course it was an arrangement from higher up: I arranged it.” He finally calmed down, adding that the press chief was an “old client.” He had already known him during his journalist days, but he had “renewed contact”
with him at the fire brigade, he said, at which point Köves asked parenthetically how, now it had come up, Sziklai felt being with the fire brigade, at which Sziklai gave a haughty dismissive wave:

“Superbly! I have them eating from the palm of my hand.” Now, he went on, the fire brigade was one of the Ministry for Production’s biggest clients, with all its orders for motor vehicles, pipes, fire ladders, helmets, and whatnot, in large quantities, and of course—as tends to be the case—goods at knock-down prices for the most part don’t come up to scratch, and then it was his—Sziklai’s—job, on behalf of the fire brigade, to raise the threat of public exposure, whereas it was the press chief’s job, on behalf of the ministry, to dissuade him from doing that, to reassure him with all sorts of promises, and the two of them generally managed to find ways of coming to terms with each other.

“If you know what I mean,” Sziklai said, winking meaningfully at Köves.

“Sure,” Köves retorted hurriedly, so as not to hold Sziklai from telling his story, because his own case was of more interest than any disputes between the fire brigade and the ministry. So anyway, Sziklai continued, during one of their talks it had come to light that a vacancy had arisen in the press chief’s department, and even though filling the position was not exactly of great urgency, still, if Sziklai happened to have a possible candidate in mind, the press chief would of course give serious consideration to offering the job to the person in question, and needless to say, said Sziklai, he had “jumped at the opportunity.”

“I told you I wouldn’t forget about you, didn’t I? That I’d find something for you without fail!” The one thing he hadn’t known, he anticipated Köves’s next question, was where Köves was to be found, given that he didn’t have his home address:

“Which is absurd, old friend. Give it to me right away!” at which Köves nodded vigorously as though that was precisely his intention,
he was only deferring doing so until later in order not to interrupt Sziklai; and Köves had also forgotten to inform him, Sziklai upbraided him further, where he had gone to work. Now, discovering his place of work was by no means as difficult as Köves no doubt supposed, he went on; he had simply donned his fire officer’s uniform, gone off to the employment office, and enquired whether they had, by any chance, recently placed in employment anywhere an individual by the name of Köves, whom the fire brigade had reason to be interested in, and of course they had immediately been of service. Köves himself, however, Sziklai had not wished to notify for the time being.

“You were behaving so oddly when I last saw you that I was afraid you were quite capable of standing in the way of your own luck!” Consequently, he had merely given Köves’s name and workplace to the press chief, and the press chief “set the matter on an official footing,” which subsequently, having done the rounds from one department to the next, had eventually arrived at the steelworks in the form of a categorical order from higher up.

“Do you get it now?” Sziklai asked.

“Sure,” Köves replied with a thin smile, like someone who admittedly might have been slightly taken in but was nevertheless not entirely oblivious to the funny side of the situation. After which Sziklai once again got Köves to repeat what the head of the shipping department had said, the things about higher conceptualisation, unbroken perfectionism, and putting people to the test, the whole situation as they had sat opposite each other and debated things in all seriousness, when he, Sziklai, and the press chief had already talked about and arranged everything ages ago, and having again laughed at the whole thing as if he were hearing it for the first time:

“You see, old chap, now that’s a true comic situation for you!” his raised index finger drawing, as it were, the abiding lesson for the two of them.

One evening, Köves bumped into Mrs. Weigand, the lady of the house; to be more accurate, as he was about to leave he was standing in the hallway when the woman called out to him from the opened kitchen door to please excuse that morning’s events, though Köves—his hand already on the door handle—could think of nothing offhand which had happened that morning (it had been a hard day at the ministry), but then it came back to him. It had concerned the boy, Peter, of course, or in truth more the fact that nowadays, since he had been working for the ministry, Köves had adopted a number of customs which pointed to being pampered; so, for example, he had taken a fancy—perhaps implanted by the girl—to having a breakfast before leaving the house, and the previous evening he had been in a shop to purchase some tea for this purpose, if not tea consisting of genuine tea, of course, at least not of the type whose fragrance or residual aroma Köves, at the moment of purchase, could almost sense shooting up from the depths of some distant and maybe nonexistent past. In the morning, then, Köves had appeared with the tea in the kitchen: he seemed to have forgotten that he no longer had to get up at daybreak, as when he had been at the steelworks, so he had caught the members of the household in the kitchen just as they were in the middle of their own breakfast, so, mumbling some sort of apology, he was about to withdraw immediately, had indeed already mentally abandoned his plan, as the idea of not breakfasting alone but in company had not figured at all among the fantasies he had woven about breakfast, yet Mrs. Weigand protested so strenuously, invited him so warmly, making space for Köves’s tea on the gas stove, that he could hardly back out without causing offence. In the end, breakfast was consumed in a tense atmosphere. Peter, who had in front of him on the table, a pocket-sized chess table with small holes in the middle of the squares into which fitted the pins of
the pieces and, holding a nibbled slice of bread in one hand, moved the chess pieces with the other, only raised his eyes to the others to signal how much of a nuisance they were to him (though even so Köves noticed that behind the thick lenses of the spectacle the boy’s beady eyes were red from strain, or sleeplessness, or possibly both), so that Mrs. Weigand gradually gave up talking, only whispering to offer Köves the sugar and the mud-pie-like bread, and was finally reduced to simply gesticulating behind her son’s back to apologize and indicate her helplessness, to the point that Köves at times felt on the verge of laughing out because it looked almost as if the two of them were the children, with the forbidding and feared head of the family ruling over them with fickle despotism.

“I can’t do a thing with him,” Mrs. Weigand complained, spreading her hands then letting them drop again in a gesture of helplessness, uncomprehendingly shaking her pallid, peaked face, tipped slightly to one side, its pools now quite without lustre. “Since the chess competition got under way I simply can’t do a thing with him,” she reiterated to Köves, who recently had sometimes found himself trying to stitch his ministerial press briefings together at home (as a result of which the time had duly come, after all, when he made use of the table to which the lady of the house had drawn his attention with such pride on the day he arrived there, which, long ago though it had been, had nevertheless remained fresh in Köves’s memory) and was forced to slam his pencil down angrily, he was so disturbed by the constant squabbling between mother and son which filtered into his room, especially the shriek of the boy’s breaking voice, like steam whistling through a valve under high pressure, though who could tell whether Köves might not secretly have been glad to be disturbed and whether he was not seeking, by that whole business with the indignation, the gesture of throwing down his pencil and leaping up angrily from the table, not only to conceal from, and justify to, himself his relief, for there was no
denying that the moment a person began to write, at least in Köves’s experience, he would instantly find himself becoming mixed up in a whole tangle of unclarified and unclarifiable contradictions.

“Is it, perhaps, that the game’s not going well for him?” Köves inquired, with a hint of gloating, it could not be denied.

“Not as well as he would like.” The woman was still shaking her head as though to indicate that she herself disapproved of what she was saying: “Apparently, nothing has been decided yet, but one game has been adjourned and it’s now a life-and-death matter that he wins the next match …,” the woman fell silent, her pools hesitantly seeking Köves’s gaze.

“Life-and-death?” Köves cocked an eyebrow in amused astonishment.

“That’s what he says,” the woman complained, seemingly already a little bit calmer for being able to talk.

“Child’s talk.” Köves broke into a smile.

“Child’s talk,” said the woman. “But then he’s still a child.” Köves was assailed by a sensation of a conversation held long, long ago being reprised.

“Well then,” he therefore brought the conversation to an end, “if it’s that important to him, then no doubt he’ll win it,” and if Köves, once he was on the stairs, felt it was exceedingly doubtful whether this really had been the appropriate solace to bestow on the woman, it was time for him to set off for the South Seas, partly in order to dine, but partly also out of duty, so that he and Sziklai might continue to turn over the matter of the light comedy, though as far as that was concerned, their brain-racking so far did not have much to show for it, comedy writing proving, at least for Köves, an onerous, depressing, and not in the slightest bit joyful labour. As in the past, when their friendship was as yet free and easy, unclouded by any common interest, Köves and Sziklai would sit every evening at their regular table in the South Seas, trade jests
with Alice—although the waitress was never at a loss for a snappy retort, it seemed as if recently this had come at the cost of some effort on her part, with the tragic furrows around her mouth also apparently more deeply set than before, so it was sometimes on the tip of Köves’s tongue to ask her why he never saw her “partner,” Berg, around in the restaurant these days, but for some reason he did not put the question to her, with Sziklai’s presence making him feel ill at ease on one occasion, while on another he would feel it was not opportune, and then again, who knows, maybe he feared what the answer might be—and amuse each other with their fire-brigade and ministry yarns, or single out a guest or party for comment, yet from the very first moment the comedy which was awaiting their attentions cast a shadow on their spirits.

“So,” Sziklai’s brow would darken on his arrival, for instance, an event that although expected nevertheless seemed to come as a surprise to him. “Given it any thought?!…”

“Too right I have.” Köves would pull himself together, as though he had been waiting all along solely to be able to impart at last all the innumerable thoughts that he was aching to get out.

“And?” Sziklai’s hard face gazed questioningly at Köves: “Have you come up with anything?”

“It has to have love as the starting point,” Köves declared adamantly.

“Fine,” Sziklai concurred, “let’s take love as the starting point. Then what?”

“There’s a boy and a girl,” Köves offered apprehensively, as though that was about as far as he was willing to push it at that moment and was worried—most likely with good reason—that it would be far from enough to satisfy Sziklai.

“What happens to them?” he could already hear the impatient voice. “What stops them from being happy?”

And since Köves subsided into silence with an expression
which was intended to be pensive but in truth was more just dark, as of someone in whom murderous passions were already being stoked against the imaginary loving couple whom they were supposed to steer into a safe haven of happiness over the course of the comedy.

“Right, so you’ve no idea,” Sziklai established, as Köves admitted with his continued guilty silence.

“There, there! No need for hanging the head,” Sziklai relented. “We need to think up a good story,” he opined.

“Indeed,” Köves agreed.

“Let’s try to think,” Sziklai would propose, at which a longer-lasting, facilitative silence would settle in between them, and all Köves had to take care of was to preserve, like some sort of theatrical mask, a haughty expression of brightly musing yet simultaneously expectant communicativeness appropriate to light comedy, as though he would speak the moment the brainwave came to him, which could be in only a matter of minutes now. His gaze and his attention, however, would be freed to go their own ways, flitting about the room, coming to rest, every now and then, on a table or face—the Transcendental Concubine over there, behind her drained glasses of spirits, resting her elbows on the table and her chin in turn on her folded hands, her empty gaze seeming to be trained on Köves but without seeing him. Did she really not see him? Köves was somewhat troubled in dragging his gaze away from her: in truth, he had a tie to her through a rather embarrassing affair, though he had only himself to blame for that, if not the girl at the factory. There was no denying that memories of the girl kept flaring up in Köves; it was far from merely a taste for breakfast that the girl had quenched in him, for she had also awakened in him a wild animal in search of game. Yes, there were times when Köves longed for a woman’s warmth, and not in the abstract but very much the practical, palpable sense of the word: longed for a woman’s body-warmth, a woman’s silkiness, a woman’s sleekness, and not necessarily the girl’s (whom he could
have located and placated, of course, had he not considered that too big a price), for Köves’s longing had no object; or to be more accurate, it was impersonal; or to be even more accurate, Köves longed for a woman, but no woman in particular, and that longing, or rather torment, might yet drag him into danger, Köves reflected. Perhaps it was precisely this that he was musing on that evening, Sziklai having gone away early, because he would have to get up the next day at dawn, because the fire brigade were holding an exercise, leaving Köves to linger solitarily over his beer, and while doing so he noticed that the Transcendental Concubine seemed to be sending him some message, first with her eyes, then by a slight quiver of a shoulder and hand; but when, with the deceitful smile that he laid out like a lawn, so to say, to cover his twinges of crude voracity, Köves got up and went over to the woman’s table, she appeared to be outraged all of a sudden: