Imre Kertész - Fiasco

Fortunately, I was not uninformed. Sas, whom I would run into every once in a while — in the street, at the cinema, at a bridge evening, but most often at the open-air pool — always kept me up to date: Grün’s success on Dutch television; the humorous articles Grün had published, one after the other; the West German production of a film with a screenplay by Grün; Sas, on the way home from a trip to London, stopping over at Grün’s villa in one of Amsterdam’s suburbs, where he cultivated tulips in his garden. Sas’s face at these moments displayed both pleasure and malice — the pleasure was meant for Grün, the malice for himself and, of course, no less for me. Sas had devised for himself a metaphysical view of life from which the metaphysics had been extracted, since he believed in consumer goods rather than in God. In his scheme of things, he himself lived in the Vale of Tears, albeit out of his own free choice, having condemned himself to it, probably through defeatism, but it comforted him greatly that, even if the chance had been blown for him, there nevertheless existed a more glittering other world in which he could have an occasional fling — whenever possible at the state’s expense.

“Of course, you never travel,” he was in the habit of reproaching me.

“Not I,” I would reply, sticking to the truth.

“Why not?” he would enquire.

“It’s not possible to get away from myself,” was one of the things I would say at this juncture.

Or else: “One can learn about the world even in a prison cell; indeed, one learns most of all there.”

Or yet again: “I don’t like it when the world from which we have been excluded is constantly portrayed as if it were ours.”

“You’re talking double Dutch. And I say Dutch because that’s the only language I understand not one word of.”

But I can see that he is nettled, and that’s enough for me. Sas, by the way, is a columnist for an illustrated weekly magazine, covering the major European languages as translator and discreetly, slyly, sensitively, and knowledgeably promoting the national line as feuilletonist and leader-writer for the inner pages. He had mentioned that Grün would be coming and wanted to see me as one of the relics of his former life. They had just happened to be discussing whether to call me by telephone.

To their great delight, I ordered a black coffee. I then rattled off a string of questions that I supposed one asks on such occasions. Mijnheer Van de Gruyn affected modesty: he had achieved a thing or two, to be sure, but he was not yet what one would call a big name. Sas let out a sharp guffaw at that. Family? Yes, a wife and a five-year-old daughter.

“Didn’t I tell you?” asked Sas.

“Of course you did. Just checking,” I tried to extricate myself. I was dismayed to sense that I was starting to run out of questions. Fortunately, Grün took over: he had heard from Sas that I was having success writing comedies, so he would like to see one of them.

“None of them is running at the moment,” I apologized.

Well in that case he would read them, he said.

“It’s not worth it,” I tried to talk him out of it. “They’re no good.” Grün let out a protracted guffaw at this and slapped me heartily on the back with his bony hand. He plainly thought I was joking.

“He hasn’t changed a bit,” he gurgled happily.

“There isn’t another person between the Yellow Sea and the Elbe who has sorted out his life as well as he has,” Sas bragged on my behalf with a paternalistic smile.

“The same for yourself,” I offered no less charitably.

“My dear chap,” Gerendás said, turning serious, “there’s a big demand for good comedies back in the West.”

Only then did I realize that I was sitting right in the middle of a farcical misunderstanding.

“I don’t write comedies any more,” I said.

“What then?” enquired Mijnheer Peeperkorn. The devil knows what got into me, but it seems the wish to open up got the better of me. Maybe I did it out of perplexity; after all, I was sitting among colleagues. But it could be that what fleetingly crossed my mind was Goethe’s good counsel that in order to preserve our poetic works from starvation, it behooves us to converse with well-intentioned connoisseurs about their origins, thereby bestowing historical value on them.

“I’ve written a novel,” I announced modestly.

“Aha!” enthused Van de Gruyn.

“And you didn’t say a word about it to me?!” Sas gave me an offended look.

“When is it due to be published?” Gerendás put his finger on the practical aspect of the matter.

“That’s just it: it won’t be published,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“The publisher rejected it.”

“Oh, I see, zo ,” Mijnheer Gruyn remarked with a slight foreign inflection, his face meanwhile assuming a noncommittal expression.

Sas, by contrast, seemed to liven up: which publishing house had rejected it, and why, he wanted to know. I replied that I didn’t know the reason, but I had received a preposterous letter from which it was clear that they had either not understood, or not wanted to understand, the novel because, I explained, it seems they ascribed any marks that it hit as down to pure luck, its audacity to clumsiness, its consequentiality to deviation.

“What is the novel about?” Sas asked.

Whatever the reason, there was no denying my embarrassment.

“What any novel is about,” I said cautiously, “it’s about life.”

Sas was not one to be thrown off so easily:

“Let’s drop for once the high-flown philosophical expositions you normally give us,” he warned. “What I wanted to know is what, specifically, your specific novel is about. Is it set in the present day?

“No,” I said.

“Then when?”

“Oh … during the war.”

“Where?”

“In Auschwitz,” I whispered.

Slight silence.

“Of course,” Van de Gruyn remarked with grudging commiseration, as if he were speaking to a half-cured leper, “you were in Auschwitz.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Have you taken leave of your senses?” Sas had recovered from his initial astonishment. “A novel about Auschwitz! In this day and age! Who on earth is going to read that?”

“Nobody,” I said, “because it’s not going to be published.”

“Surely you didn’t suppose,” he asked, “that they were going to fling their arms round your neck?”

“Why not? It’s a good novel,” I said.

“Good? What do mean by good?”

“What else?” I stuttered. “Good means good. A self-explanatory whatsit … that is to say … good an und für sich , if I may put it that way.”

“ An und für sich ,” Sas glanced at Gerendás, as if he were interpreting my words, then slowly turned his elegant, narrow, sharp-beaked head back toward me, his half-closed eyes and the yellowish sideburns framing his ruddy face reminding me of a sad and sleepy, widely experienced fox. “ An und für sich ,” he repeated calmly. “But good for whom ? What is anybody going to make of it?! Where are you living? Which planet do you think you are on?” he asked with growing distress. “Not a soul in the trade has ever heard of you, and you go and send in a novel, and to top it all one on a subject like that …”

“That Sas,” Mijnheer Gruyn attempted to smooth things over, “he hasn’t changed a bit. He was always such a … what’s the phrase … smart-arse, azes ponem ,” he gleefully hit upon the words he had been seeking. “Do you remember when …”

But by now there was no holding Sas back; me neither, for that matter.

“In other words, I’m not entitled to write a good novel!” I heard the angry yelps of my own voice.