Imre Kertész - Fiasco

The square was deserted, with no sign of any taxi or night transport; Köves set off on foot with the peculiar assurance of a person led by memory, or by his travel experiences, although he could not boast of any travel experience, nor could memory have guided him in a place he had never been before. He left streets behind him, the houses bordered the line of his steps like decimated, lurching beggars, and Köves recalled that he had been startled when an infant had suddenly cried out from behind a window, as if he were surprised that children were also raised in this city. At street corners he was always gripped by the same shy hope: each time he hoped he had lost his way. Yet each and every time he came upon precisely the place he had known in advance, and at worst he did not recognize it immediately; for instance, in the place of a tall building he might now find a ruin or an empty lot; in place of a specific stretch of street that he would look for in vain, he would find one of a different character yet, in the end, exactly the same.

In Köves’s memory, these minutes remained the most testing: he was going around a foreign city with whose every nook and cranny he was nevertheless familiar — a strange sensation. Köves did not know how to wrestle with it. His legs were leaden, as if he were walking not on asphalt but in sticky tar. At one point, he noticed by the edge of the pavement an advertising pillar, which was adorned with just one poster, and even that was a scrap, for the greater part of it had been ripped off or become detached due to the vicissitudes of the weather. CITY OF LIGHT, Köves read in big capitals. Was it an advertisement? A slogan? A cinema bill? A command? At all events the street was dark; Köves was reminded of how full of hope he had been on arrival, the unhesitating confidence with which he had followed that beam of light; though it had happened only shortly before, Köves still felt as if he had travelled an endless road since then, up hill and down dale, from the warmth into the cold, and the road he had covered had used up all his strength. The sense of wonder had quit him, bit by bit; he was seized by a benevolent weakness, and in the way he ran his hand over a scabby house wall or a boarded-up shop window, in the way his steps found their way in the already familiar streets, Köves was possessed by that unfamiliar, and yet at the same time relaxed, almost intimate sense of homelessness that was on the verge of suggesting, to an intellect sinking back into dull exhaustion, that he was, indeed, back home.

At this point, his recollections started to become disjointed, even undirected, like his steps; he again emerged into a square somewhere; he rambled along a dusty promenade among broken see-saws, abandoned sandcastles, heavy, ungainly benches that had been left high and dry from bygone days, and might have been taken for a wandering drunk — at least that was how the question, full of good-humoured support, and addressed to him from one of the benches, sounded to his ears:

“Whither, whither into the night are you going, old pal?” And he can hardly have dispelled that impression with his answer:

“Home,” which had the ring of a gentle complaint. The man who had addressed him — Köves saw him in the murk of the spreading tree which overhung the bench more as an indistinct blob — was assuming a grave air as he nodded understandingly, like someone who fully appreciated that little good could be waiting for Köves back home.

“So is it far to go still?” he pressed his inquiries. In a rather doubtful tone, like someone who would not be surprised if he were to be informed that he was talking nonsense, Köves named the street, but the man merely said, with a renewed sympathetic nod:

“Well yes, that’s a fair way off from here.”

“But shorter if I go out by the bank of the Danube,” Köves gave it another go, again rather as if he were counting on being rebutted, on having it explained to him, for example, that he was blathering, there was no bank of the Danube here, while nobody had heard of the street, yet the stranger merely disputed whether Köves would really be able to cut his journey in the direction he had indicated:

“Take a breather first, chum!” he proposed, and Köves slowly, awkwardly lowered his body to sit beside him — for just a couple of minutes, of course, in order to pull himself together — on the bench.

But as to how they whiled away those few hours, sitting here next to each other, that — apart from his ever more uncertain attempts to depart (as if he did not just tolerate but frankly expected the pianist, each and every time to prevail upon him to stay) — Köves would have found it hard to say. Naturally they had talked; they had probably entertained themselves with funny stories, because Köves recollected having laughed. It had not taken long for the flat bottle to materialize for the first time from the pianist’s pocket, and, turning it round and round in a hand raised on high, he had done his utmost to capture on it the dying rays of the moon descending onto a nearby house roof:

“Cognac,” he whispered playfully in a respectful, all but reverential tone.

At all events, he soon took Köves into his confidence, relating that he played in a nightclub called the Twinkling Star:

“I’m acting as if you didn’t know, being that you’re one of our regulars,” he said.

“Oh yes,” Köves hastened to confirm.

“Though I haven’t seen much of you recently.” The pianist peered at Köves with a frown, looking suspicious all of a sudden: “Who exactly are you, anyway?” he asked, as if he had unexpectedly regretted having asked Köves to sit beside him, and, having scratched his head in vain to come up with some sort of explanation or justification as to his identity, all that Köves could say in his sudden confusion was:

“Who indeed?” and shrugged his shoulders. “I’m called Köves,” he added; it was odd to hear his name sounding so insignificant that it rang almost disparagingly.

Yet it seemed this completely reassured the pianist: from the bottomless, satchel-like pockets of the overcoat that lay unbuttoned on his belly there now emerged sandwiches in paper serviettes.

“Life is short, the night is long,” he said merrily. “I always stock up before closing time. Go ahead!” he offered them to Köves, himself taking a big bite of one. “In the Twinkling Star,” he carried on with his mouth full, “you can come by exclusive nibbles, can’t you, even in this day and age.” The pianist at this point pulled a one-sided smile, as if he were speaking contemptuously about the place, about which, at one and the same time, in a manner Köves would have found hard to explain, he was nevertheless bragging. “When was the last time you ate any ham?” He winked at Köves.

“This evening,” Köves gave himself away.

“Oh!” The pianist was amazed. “Where?”

“On the flight,” said Köves. “That’s what the stewardess brought round,” he added by way of explanation, at which the pianist burst out laughing, as if he had finally made Köves out, and after some hesitation, and at first by no means as heartily but then all the more self-forgetfully, as if something had lifted inside him, Köves joined in.

“So, tell me now,” the pianist said, slapping his thigh, “what else did you have?”

“Cold sirloin of beef, a peach, wine, chocolate,” Köves recited, and both of them doubled up with laughter, so that even Köves had the feeling he was giving voice to distant fantasies, and childish ones at that, which were of no use at all other than for giving the grown-ups something to laugh about for a few minutes.

A bit later, however, the pianist again became long-faced; it seemed as if, behind the cheerfully glib words, he had continued to be preoccupied with disquieting thoughts, and he made ever more frequent references to his occupation and the nightclub, especially after Köves had remarked that it must be great to be an instrumentalist: he, Köves, supposed that a musician’s life was a truly splendid, independent life, all it required was the talent for it, but that was something that he, Köves, sadly did not have.