Imre Kertész: Fiasco

But the old boy did not have so much as a glimmer of an idea, little as that may be, for the book he needed to write.

Despite having done truly everything in his power as far as he was concerned (for, as we have seen, at this very moment he was standing in front of the filing cabinet and thinking).

In recent days he had already gone through every one of his old, older, or still older ideas, sketches and fragments, which he kept in a folder furnished with the title “ Ideas, sketches, fragments ,” but either they had proved unusable or else he had understood not a word of them (even though he himself had been the one who noted them down some time before, or some time before that, or still further back in time).

He had even undertaken lengthy walks in the Buda hills (contemplative walks, as the old boy called them).

All to no avail.

Now, with his ideas, sketches, fragments, and walks (contemplative walks, as the old boy called them) in turn, one after the other, all having come to nought, all that was left was his papers.

It had been a long time since he had seen his papers.

Not that he wished to see them.

He had even hidden them in the farthest depths of the filing cabinet in order to avoid somehow catching sight of them.

So the old boy had to be in a very tight spot indeed to be driven, for once, to place his ultimate trust — if previously it had been on a stroke of good fortune (which, for known reasons, we might better amend to the virtually impossible), then on the his ideas, sketches, fragments and his contemplative walks — in his papers.

But at this juncture it is to be feared that if we do not break away a bit from the old boy’s train of thought, we shall never get to see in the clear light that is indispensable to what follows the subtle, but not inconsequential, difference between ideas, sketches, and fragments, on the one hand, and papers, on the other.

It may be that we shall not be forced into too lengthy an explanation.

Specifically, ideas, sketches, and fragments are only produced by someone who is driven to those resorts by imperative and pressing reasons; someone — like the old boy, for instance — whose occupation happens to be writing books (or rather, to be more precise, for whom things had so transpired that this had become his occupation) (seeing as he had no other occupation).

Papers, on the other hand, everybody has. If not a number of them, then certainly one: a scrap of paper on which one noted down something at some time, presumably something important that was not to be forgotten and was carefully put away — and then forgotten about.

Papers which preserve adolescent poems.

Papers through which one sought a way out at a critical period.

Possibly an entire diary.

A house plan.

A budget for a difficult year ahead. A letter one started to write.

A message—“Back soon”—that may later have proved to be portentous.

At the very least a bill, or the washing instructions torn off some undergarment, on the reverse side of which we discover minute, faded, unfamiliar and by now illegible lettering — our own handwriting.

The old boy had a whole file of such papers.

As we have perhaps already mentioned, he kept them in the farthest depths of the filing cabinet in order to avoid somehow catching sight of them.

Now that he wanted the exact opposite — namely, to catch sight of them — he first had to lift out of the filing cabinet his typewriter, several files — among them one labelled “ Ideas, sketches, fragments ”—as well as two cardboard boxes which held a miscellany of objects (both necessary and unnecessary) (at all events only the occasion of the particular moment could assign a firm ascription to those designations) (as a result of which the old boy could never know for sure which of these objects were necessary and which unnecessary) (a distinction that became all the more unclear, as years might go by without his opening the lids of the two cardboard boxes and so casting even a single glance over the variety of objects, necessary and unnecessary alike).

This, then, was his way of ensuring that he caught sight of the ordinary, grey, standard-sized (HS 5617) box file containing his papers.

On the grey file, as a paperweight, so to say, squatted (or swaggered) (or sphered) (depending on the angle from which one looked at it) a likewise grey, albeit a darker grey, stone lump; in other words, a stone lump of irregular shape about which there is nothing reassuring that we might say (for instance, that it was a polygonal parallelepiped) (anything, in fact, that can soothingly reconcile the human soul to the world of objects, without its ever truly comprehending them, insofar as they at least match a familiar construct, thus allowing the matter to be left at that), seeing that this particular lump of stone, by virtue of its still extant or already worn-down edges, corners, roundings, bumps, grooves, fissures, projections, and indentations was as irregular as any lump of stone can be about which one cannot tell whether it is a mass from which a smaller lump has been broken off or, conversely, the remnant small lump of a larger stone mass, which in its turn — like a cliff face to a mountain — was in all certainty part of a still larger stone mass (but then every lump of stone instantly entices one into prehistoric deliberations) (which are not our aim) (difficult though they are to resist) (most especially when we happen to be dealing with a lump of stone which diverts our failing imagination toward ulterior) (or rather primordial) (beginnings, ends, masses and unities, so that in the end we retreat to our hopeless) (though it is at least invested with the alleged dignity of knowledge) (ignorance regarding which, for this lump of stone as for so many other things, one cannot tell whether it is a small lump broken off from a larger stone mass or, conversely, the remnant small lump of a larger stone mass).

The situation pertaining at the start of our story, to which we have consistently adhered all along — not at all out of obstinacy, merely due to the ponderousness of the old boy’s decision-making process — has now been modified as follows:

The old boy was standing in front of a wide-open filing cabinet, in whose half-emptied upper drawer only a grey box file, upon which, as a paperweight, so to say, a likewise grey, albeit a darker grey, lump of stone is visible, and was thinking:

“I’m afraid,” he thought, “I’m finally going to have to get my papers out.”

Which, by the way, is what he proceeded to do.

And then, out of orderliness (for what other reason might we discern) (unless we take the shortage of space into consideration) (or perhaps as a way of setting a seal on the irrevocability of the decision), he tidied the typewriter, several files — among them one labelled “ Ideas, sketches, fragments ”—as well as the two cardboard boxes back into the upper drawer of the filing cabinet.

It may be found to be more than sheer prolixity if we were now to report, as briefly as we can, on a further modification to the situation pertaining at the start of our story, already modified as it is:

The old boy was standing in front of the filing cabinet and reading.

“ August 1973

What has happened, has happened; I can do nothing about it now. I can do as little to alter my past as the future implacably ensuing from it, with which I am as yet unacquainted …”

“Good God!” the old boy uttered aloud.

“… Yet I move just as aimlessly within the narrow confines of my present as in the past or the time which is to come.

How I got to this position, I don’t know. I simply frittered away my childhood. There are no doubt deep psychological explanations for why I should have been such a poor student in the lower classes at grammar school. (“You don’t even have the excuse of being dumb, because you have a brain, if only you would use it,” as my father often stressed.) Later, when I was fourteen and a half, through a conjunction of infinitely inane circumstances, I found myself looking down the barrel of a loaded machine gun for half an hour. It is practically impossible to describe those circumstances in normal language. Suffice it to say that I was standing in a crowd which was sweating fear, and who knows what scraps of thoughts, in the narrow courtyard of a police barracks, the one thing which all the individuals had in common being that we were all Jews. It was a crystal-clear, flower-scented summer evening, a full moon beaming up above us. The air was filled with a steady, low throbbing: obviously Royal Air Force formations flying from their Italian bases and headed for unknown targets, and the danger which threatened us was that if they should chance to drop a bomb on the barracks or its environs, the gendarmes would mow us down, as they phrased it. The ludicrous connections and imbecilic reasons on which that rested were, I felt then and also since then, absolutely negligible. The machine gun was mounted on a stand rather like the tripod of a cine camera. Standing behind it, on some sort of platform, was a gendarme with drooping Turanian moustache and impassively narrowed eyes. Fitted onto the end of the barrel was a ridiculous conical component, rather like the one on my grandmother’s coffee grinder. We waited. The drone’s rumbling grew louder and then again faded to a low buzz, only for each quiet interval to give way to a renewed intensification of the rumbling. Would it drop or wouldn’t it, that was the question. Gradually the gendarmes let the deranged good humour of gamblers take control of them. Is there any way I can describe the unforeseen good spirits that, after I had got over my initial surprise, coursed through me as well? All I had to do to be able to enjoy the game, in a certain fashion, was to recognize the triviality of the stake. I grasped the simple secret of the universe that had been disclosed to me: I could be gunned down anywhere, at any time. It may be that this …”