Imre Kertész - Fiasco

“Until then, rack your brains for a good idea,” Sziklai said by way of a parting shot, and with an easy smile, which may have been directed at the sunshine and the prospect of gratifying a sudden wish for solitude, Köves responded:

“I’ll try.”

Köves went off to the authorities in order to get his temporary residence endorsed as permanent and to obtain ID papers to that effect: Mrs. Weigand, the landlady, had reminded him for the second time that, insofar as he wished to carry on lodging with her, he needed to attend to his official registration as soon as possible.

“Of course, I don’t know what plans you have,” she said casting her clear little pools up at Köves, and Köves smiled uncertainly, as if he had less idea about those plans than even Mrs. Weigand.

“To be sure,” he said, therefore, “I’m finding it very satisfactory here,” as if that were the reason he was there, not anything else, to which the woman responded:

“I’m glad to hear it!” as she picked some invisible thread or crumb off the tablecloth. They were standing in Köves’s small room — Köves had vainly offered Mrs. Weigand the sole chair as a seat, so he too remained standing — with the afternoon already getting on for evening, though not yet time to switch on the lights, and the landlady had just before knocked on Köves’s door. Köves had initially flinched slightly, thinking the boy was going to burst in on him again, but before he called out “Come in!” it occurred to him that it could hardly be him as Peter was not in the habit of knocking.

“You didn’t even mention that you’re a journalist,” the woman carried on, with a hint of mock reproach lurking in her voice and a timid smile appearing on her pallid, pinched face, as if she were in the presence of a renowned man with whom she ought to speak with restraint, and Köves, who had indeed mentioned nothing of the kind, was astounded at how well she was informed. How could that be? Did the grapevine work that fast there? Yet instead of asking for clarification, he considered it of greater urgency for himself to supply some clarification, as if he wished to dispel a disagreeable misunderstanding which almost amounted to mudslinging:

“Yes,” he said, “only I’m not with a newspaper.” Then, not caring what a letdown it might cause the woman (for all he knew she might have already been boasting that she had a journalist as her lodger), he swiftly tacked on: “They fired me.”

But if she did feel any letdown, that did not show on the woman: it seemed as if she had, in some manner, become more relaxed; her face. cagey beforehand, now assuming a surprised, yet for all that, a warmer expression, and in a tone that Köves felt was more natural than before she quietly acknowledged:

“So, they fired you,” and, head slightly askance, she looked up at Köves with interest, and, being a blonde, albeit possibly from a bottle, she now reminded Köves of a canary. “You poor thing,” she added, at which Köves raised an eyebrow as though he were about to protest but didn’t know yet what he should say. It was thus again the landlady who spoke next, now asking in a confidential tone, as if there was no longer anything to hide between them, and at the same time softly, as if she did not want others to hear them (although there was no one except themselves in the room, of course):

“And why?…”

Köves for his part responded:

“Can anyone know?”—an answer which now again seemed not to miss its mark:

“No,” said the woman, slowly lowering herself onto the previously offered but at the time rejected seat, all expression being extinguished from her face, as if she had suddenly become aware of being inordinately tired, “one can’t.” They held their silence for a short while, and so as not to make the landlady feel awkward, Köves sat down too on his bed, while Mrs. Weigand, for want of more crumbs or threads, now started fiddling with the fringe of the tablecloth.

“I’ll tell you what,” she eventually spoke in the deep voice that Köves had heard from her only once before, on the morning of his arrival, “there are times when I feel that I understand nothing any more.” She slowly raised her head to look at Köves, the unexpected pools among the zigzagging wrinkles now seeming to have shadows cast on them by dark clouds. “As a matter of fact,” she continued, “I ought to be apologizing to you.” Then, maybe taking Köves’s silence to be incomprehension or perhaps expectancy: “On account of my son,” she tacked on: “He’s a nuisance, I don’t doubt.” There was no gainsaying it, Köves had been having trouble with the boy; already the very first evening, when Köves was getting ready to go to bed, having had practically no sleep for two days on end, the boy had simply opened the door on him, chessboard under his elbow: “I’m here!” as if, amid the myriad other urgent calls on his time, only now, at last, did he have the time to spare to meet a longstanding obligation toward the lodger. It was useless for Köves to look for a cop-out, in vain that he instanced his tiredness and bad humour, the boy had already spread out the board on Köves’s couch and made a start on setting up the chessmen. “Black or white?” He glanced severely at Köves from behind his glinting spectacles, and promptly answered for him: “White. Your start.” So, Köves started, then waited for his opponent to move, then again moved, hardly paying attention to the board, his hand pulling the pieces about mechanically, essentially independently of himself, in accordance with some dreamlike battle array that his fingers had somehow, no knowing how, retained a memory of, something that had entered them, perhaps, when he was still a boy himself — almost marvelling, Köves smiled to himself at the thought: there had been a time, of course, when he too was a child, and he only snatched up his head in response to a hissing sound. It was Peter, lips contorted, head trembling, his face seemingly drained of the last drop of blood. “Such a cheap sucker trap … a cheap sucker trap … and I fell for it!” he was hissing, glaring at Köves with a look of hatred from behind misted-up spectacles. Then: “I resign!” whereat board and chessmen went flying in all directions, at which Köves, in his initial discomposure, began bending down to pick them up until it came to mind that he was dealing with a child who therefore should not be spoiled but chastised. “Pick up now the bits you’ve chucked around!” he rebuked him in the sternest voice he could manage. But the injunction was unnecessary: the boy was already scrabbling around on all fours on the floor, and just a few minutes later the board was already in front of Köves, with the pieces set in their places. “I’ll hammer you now, thirty times in a row!” the boy informed him through clenched teeth, as if he were preparing to wrestle, rather than play chess, with Köves. He thereupon opened the next game. Köves most likely fell asleep several times while play was in progress, at which the boy would either nudge his knee or bawl out “Your move!” while Mrs. Weigand also popped her head round the door from time to time to enquire shyly: “Is the game not over?” and then disappear again, to which the boy paid no heed, except that once he remarked, evidently not so much for Köves’s benefit as just for its own sake, out of petulance:

“I hate it most of all when she calls it a game!” “Why?” Köves was aroused by a spark of curiosity, “Isn’t that what it is?” “No way,” the boy snapped back curtly. “What then?” Köves poked further: “Work, perhaps?” “Got it in one!” It seemed as though the boy were glancing at Köves with a spot of respect. “I need a way of pulling myself out of this shit!” he added, but without expanding on that; teeth clenched, frowning, he was already pondering the next move, and his voice was already snapping brusquely, dryly, like a rifle shot aimed at Köves: “Check!” In the end, all her rational arguments — that it was late, for instance, or the lodger might be tired, and especially that it was long past Peter’s bedtime, and tomorrow they both had school or the office to face — proved fruitless, and Mrs. Weigand had to literally drag her son out of Köves’s room, yet for a long time still that evening Köves was able to hear the boy’s hoarsely menacing and the woman’s soothingly engaged voices.