Imre Kertész - Fiasco

So that is how it happened. Lacking in certainty to the degree that I was, I somehow had to convince myself that I existed after all. I responded to the preserved murder attempts — both real and symbolic — now with neurasthenic apathy, now with aggression. However, I recognized fairly quickly (I am a rational creature, after all) that I was more vulnerable than the outside world. In the end, out of weakness and impotence, as well as out of a certain desperation and a sort of vague hope, I began to write. That’s it, it’s done: here is the answer to my question. And here I could also bring these remarks to a conclusion.

It is just that something inside me bristles against finishing. My remarks are at an end, but I carry on. I am running out of letters, and once again I shall be left standing at a loss for what to do with the seconds, hours, and days as they succeed one another. As you see, what should I pick again but exactly the same therapy, and again with exactly the same result as when I set to work on writing the novel. It’s not as if I were seeking a solution — I am well aware that there is no solution for life — but I find that a mere listing of symptoms is not enough. A medical report does nothing to help me: as the patient, it’s the pain that interests me. Not the diagnosis, but the process, the active disease. ‘The details. Above all, the details,’ as Ivan Karamazov, the instigator, says as he interrogates Smerdyakov, the killer. Just don’t finish, since nothing ever comes to an end: I have to continue, carry on writing, yes, confidentially and with sickening talkativeness, like two killers chatting. Yet what I have to say is as bleakly impersonal as a murder reduced to the soulless, to just another statistic which is just as super …

“Teleph …?”

“… fluous as writing a book …”

“For the love of …!”

“I was beginning to think you weren’t home!” the reproachful voice of the old boy’s mother drilled like a laser beam into mashed potatoes (a simile which cannot be said to be either graphically or logically apposite) (since what would a laser beam be doing drilling into mashed potatoes) (but in the heat of the moment that was what sprang into the old boy’s mind, and we have no right to concoct a better one in its place) (let alone a worse one) (insofar as we wish to remain faithful chroniclers of his story) (and what else might be our goal) into the plug of fusible wax.

“Where else would I be?” the old boy snapped.

“Who can tell with you?!.. Guess what has happened. The little glass shelf on which I keep my cacti has broken. The pots fell as well, and one of them is smashed, the earth is all over the floor. What should I do now?”

“Sweep it up,” the old boy suggested.

“I’m not exactly clueless!” the next laser beam pierced the old boy’s skull. “What I want to know is, where I am going to find a new glass shelf!”

“From a glazier,” hazarded the old boy.

“A glazier! It’s not as if the neighbourhood is crawling with glaziers!.. You wouldn’t happen to know of a good one, would you?”

“No,” the old boy said.

“Of course not. When did you ever know anything?!”

“If you put it like that …” said the old boy indignantly.

“Aren’t you even going to ask me how the accident happened?”

“Yes, of course,” answered the old boy hurriedly.

“I wanted to dust the picture which hangs above it, but I got up on the chair so awkwardly that my housecoat snagged on the corner of the glass shelf. I think that ripped too … I didn’t even look yet …”

“You shouldn’t be climbing on chairs at your age,” counselled the old boy.

“You don’t say!” a hand grenade exploded in the old boy’s auricle. “I don’t need others to tell me what I can and can’t do at my age … but since I’ve had my backache and can’t go into the office, I can only afford a cleaning lady once a week. It’s no use my asking you to come over and dust for me!”

“You could be right about that,” acknowledged the old boy.

“There you are! Did you arrange to be taken off the register yet?”

“No,” quailed the old boy.

“You’ve had so much else to do the whole week, I suppose?”

“There’s been enough,” the old boy bristled. “I’m working to a deadline; I have a translation to do.”

“You’re slipping lower and lower. You started off writing plays, then a novel, and now it’s translating.”

“And I’ll be a typist before too long,” the old boy remarked in annoyance.

“What you choose to make of yourself is your own affair, but you’re running out of time to decide. You’re not getting any younger either.”

“That’s nice of you,” the old boy muttered.

“But you have to get yourself off the register double-quick so I can get the maintenance contract signed.”

“All right,” said the old boy.

“I know your ‘all rights’ by now. You always put things off till the last possible moment. That’s exactly what got you where you are today,” was the parting shot from the old boy’s mother.

“That’s today shot to pieces,” thought the old boy.

“I ought to pack it in,” he pondered further.

“The whole thing, I mean,” he continued to ponder.

… I packed it all in …

“There you are.” The old boy cheered up (a little).

… I decided to go for a walk …

“Very sensible,” the old boy approved.

… which was how I came to be on Margaret Island …

“Big mistake,” thought the old boy peevishly.

… Who should I see at a table in one of the open-air restaurants, under the rustle of the languidly drooping leafy boughs, but Árpád Sas, with another fellow …

“Worse luck,” muttered the old boy.

… two exotically plumed male parrots under the horse-chestnut trees, two coloured shirts, two distinguished, elegant heads. I was about to give them a wide berth …

“Uh-huh,” the old boy perked up.

… but it was too late: Árpád Sas had already spotted me …

“He would, wouldn’t he,” gloated the old boy.

… invited me over to the table with an insistent wave of the hand:

“Aha! the prince of life! Come on and join us, my archduke, the very man we were waiting for!”

“Why don’t you go to hell?” I enquired in my friendliest fashion as I clambered over the flower tubs which enclosed the terrace. He did not reply to this but glanced in discreet triumph at the other fellow, who on my arrival had got to his feet by the table and was smiling broadly. He was tall and spindly, his hair flecked with grey, his spectacles round-framed, and at the sight of his yellowing big teeth between dark moustache and minute beard, long-deposited scraps of memory began sluggishly stirring within me, like grounds at the bottom of a cup of coffee.

“So? So?” he enquired with a slightly foreign accent.

“Hellfire and damnation!” as Jules Verne’s English sea captains say.

“Mijnheer Van de Gruyn, the Dutch cocoa plantationer!” I exclaimed.

“You idiot!” guffawed Gerendás Van de Gruyn, who was called Grün when he came into the world. “You haven’t changed a bit in seventeen years!”

That was debatable but this wasn’t the right moment to point it out. Instead I emitted a medley of sounds, ranging from joyous amazement to chummy familiarity. I immediately slipped into my role as into a long-discarded and unexpectedly rediscovered pair of slippers. I played myself, or to be more precise the good old pal whose image Gerendás had sustained. God knows who he was; God knows what possessed me to try to live up to an old photograph that, even in those days, was probably not faithful: perhaps it was that permanent fear we have that our image will in the end fade away forever.