Imre Kertész - Fiasco

Although he had been allocated his home, Köves did not spend the remaining hours of that night in his bed; as to exactly where he did spend them, in the first moments of starting up from an, in all likelihood, brief and light, yet nonetheless all-obliterating dream, maybe he did not know either. The sky had assumed a glassy brightness; his limbs felt stiff and numb, his shoulder blades were pressed up against the back of a bench in the park area of a public square, his neck felt as if it had been dislocated: it could be that as he was sleeping he had simply laid it on the shoulder of the stranger seated next to him, a basically well-built, tubby man wearing a polka-dot bow-tie.

“Woken up, have we?” the stranger inquired with a friendly smile on his moon face.

Since Köves was still staring at him wordlessly, and with the confused gaze of someone who has been awakened suddenly, he added by way of explanation:

“You had a good long sleep here, on my shoulder.” From which it seemed that they must have got onto informal speaking terms in the course of the night. But no, only now did Köves recall that the man had spoken in a familiar tone from the very start, had addressed him as if they were already acquainted — obviously confusing him with someone else — and he, Köves, had let it pass, not being one to stand on his dignity. Köves also recollected that his new acquaintance had called himself a bar pianist, who had come from his place of work, a nearby nightclub (Köves had been utterly amazed to note to himself at the time that — whatever next! — the place even has a nightclub), in order to clear his lungs of the bar’s smoky air here on the park bench.

How long could he have been asleep? A minute or an hour? Köves looked disorientedly around: the sparsely placed street lamps were still lit — green-flamed gas lamps on cast-iron posts with spiral ornaments, as in Köves’s happier childhood days — and electric lights were glowing here and there in the windows of the grey, shabby houses surrounding the square. Köves could practically hear the bustling going on behind them, the rushed and hasty noises of waking up and getting ready, and was almost waiting for the as yet closed front doors to spring open and people to pour out of the damp doorways and line up in order to be counted. He must have dreamed something, his irrational ideas were mostly likely still being fed by that, yet Köves was nevertheless seized by a disagreeable emotion, a sense of having omitted to do something: he had already been put on a roll call somewhere, he was missing from somewhere, and an irreparable silence would be the response to the strident announcement of his name.

“I have to go!” he suddenly jumped up from the bench.

“Where to?” The pianist registered surprise, and it occurred to Köves just how often, over the past hours, this surprised, or at least surprised-sounding, voice had already held him back from leaving.

“Home,” he said.

“What for?” With his eyes rounded and hands outspread, the pianist certainly looked like someone who was unable to make head or tail of Köves, again rousing the feeling in Köves that only at the expense of an unusual effort would he be able to convey his intentions, which even then would be left as some sort of ludicrous cavilling.

“I’m tired,” he said hesitantly, as if offering an excuse.

“So, relax!” The pianist patted the broken planks of the bench with a podgily soft hand. Perhaps still not truly awake, Köves felt his resistance weakening; the earlier pressing urgency had been replaced within him by a pleasant torpidity.

“You can’t put your head down now anyway,” the pianist explained, as though to a child. “By the time you snuggle into bed and fall asleep, the alarm clock will be ringing. Or is it just that your mind won’t rest unless you are rushing around after something?” Catching on slowly, as it were, Köves was now starting to be almost ashamed of himself, feeling he could be convinced of anything if he came up against the necessary patience or energy.

“Sit back down for a while,” the pianist continued. “Look!” he produced from his coat pocket a flat bottle that was already rather familiar to Köves. “There’s a drop still slopping about the bottom of this. That’ll bring you round.” So Köves complied again, as he had so many times during the hours which had passed. Those hours had now left in Köves’s mind an impression merely of some sort of obscure struggle of which he himself seemed to be not so much a participant as merely the object — an object that he was soon happier to abandon to the enemy than quarrel over, because, or so Köves felt — right then it was just a burden to him. This mind-numbing exhaustion, the night’s unclassifiable experiences, then to top it all those fine, fiery slugs he had swigged from the continually proffered bottle — that had to be the reason why even now, with his mind clearing, Köves was only able to summon up a few fragmentary details.

At all events, he had got into town from the airport by bus; Köves remembered how he had tried to stay alert, but his head had kept growing heavy with sleep and dropping onto his chest. His aim had been as clear as it was obscure: first of all, to reach a bed, in order at last to get a good sleep, with everything else taking its turn after that. He found the full address of his apartment in the envelope, at the top of a printed page, which had an official appearance: a registration form or a permit, in the dim lighting of the airport arrivals hall, and in his haste to reach the bus, Köves did not try to make head or tail of it, the one thing he managed to pick out being that he was obliged at all times to show it at the behest of any authority. Köves had a vague idea that he had already walked down the designated street — not here, of course, not one street of which he had seen as yet, let alone walked down, but in the place from which he had started on life’s journey, his native city, Budapest; but Köves managed quite easily to gloss over this difference, despite the fact that it might have become a source of misunderstanding, because he was cherishing a hope that he would find his street here, too, and if there was no other way, then he would get into a taxi, his purse would stand that.

The bus, a decrepit rattletrap of a crate, shook the very spirit from him. Köves saw factories, endless dismal suburbs, neglected, tumbledown dwellings, then nothing, after which a jolt again startled him awake: they were snaking along barely lit side streets, the windows were dark, a reek of insecticide was seeping out of the houses, the streets were deserted. Köves recalled there being later on a broad, dark thoroughfare with vacant lots between the houses, then a sharp bend, and all at once he found himself in a square (as best he recalled he was asked to get off, because they had reached the terminus), where Köves in the first flush of curiosity looked around with a measure of inward approval, as though he knew exactly where he had arrived.

Yet he soon realized that this feeling of his ran counter to sound common sense and, of course — as became clear on closer inspection — counter to reality. All it came down to was Köves’s hunch that he had seen the square somewhere before now, in the way that, arriving like this, in the middle of the night, at any central square of that kind, in any city, might have seemed familiar to him at first glance — from his dreams, from movies, from travel brochures, from illustrated guidebooks, from memories of unfathomable origin. The square to which it bore a likeness, or rather to which he likened it, Köves had last seen in Budapest before he had left on his travels: it was a quadrangular square, girded by proud buildings, in the middle of which was a diminutive park, in which stood an imposing group of statues. Now, this square too was unquestionably quadrangular, but of course differently: there were buildings here as well — even the dim street lighting revealed something of their original magnificence — yet what a lamentable sight they presented now! All maimed, senile war invalids. Köves was dumbfounded. Blackened walls, peeling plasterwork, pitting, and clefts everywhere. Were they bearing the traces of fighting? Had they been struck by some natural calamity? One of the houses, as if blinded, was lacking the entire row of windows on its uppermost floor, and in place of ornamental portals and elegant shops were mute gateways and boarded-up shop windows. In the middle of this square too Köves saw a sculptural group, the shoulders and chest of its main subject — a seated man — towering on a high plinth spattered with bird droppings, and he stepped closer in order to look him in the eyes (that sombre expression might, perhaps, put him on the right track), but the bowed head stared, sunk uncommunicatively, inscrutably, into darkness.