Imre Kertész - Fiasco

“An odd boy!” Köves remarked.

“Yes, but you have to understand him.” The woman was quick to get in her counter, and it was somehow well-drilled, as if it were not the first time she had used it and maybe — so Köves sensed — had to keep permanently on tap. “Things aren’t easy for him,” Mrs. Weigand went on, “and I have my difficulties with him. He’s at just the age when he is in most need of his father …”

She fell silent, and Köves, out of some obscure compulsion, as if he had been called upon for some purpose, though he didn’t know precisely what, followed that with:

“To be sure, he went quickly enough …”

What he said cannot have been clear, however, because Mrs. Weigand stared at him uncomprehendingly: “Who did?” she asked.

“I mean,” Köves chose his words carefully: he had strayed onto tricky ground, but now that he was there he could not retreat, of course: “I mean, he left you a widow at an early age …”

“Oh, I see,” said the woman. She remained silent for a short while before suddenly hurling at Köves’s face:

“They carted him off and he perished at their hands!” And, head held high, she stared at him almost provocatively, with a strange defiance, as if she were heaping all her sufferings at Köves’s feet and was now waiting for Köves to trample on them.

Nothing of the kind happened, however. Köves nodded a few times, slowly, with the sympathetic, rather long face of someone who, while of course not regarding it as right, also does not find it particularly unusual that someone, as Mrs. Weigand put it, was “carted off” and “perished at their hands,” and who will make do with the dead without expecting further illumination as to the details; the woman’s tense face, on the other hand, gradually relaxed and slackened, as if she had grown weary of the silence which had descended on them, or perhaps suspected him of harbouring a secret complicity woven between them, as it were, by their silence.

“Yes,” she reiterated, this time languidly and even, it seemed, a touch listlessly, “they carted him off, and he perished at their hands! That’s at the bottom of all this. There’s no way he can accept it.”

“How do you mean?” Köves asked.

“He’s ashamed of his father,” Mrs. Weigand said.

“Ashamed?” Köves was astonished.

“He says: Why didn’t he stand his ground?” the woman feigned exasperation with upflung hands and head, as though she were now living, not with her husband, but with a question which was constantly coming up and to which she had now become just as accustomed as to her own helplessness.

“Child’s talk,” Köves broke into a smile.

“Child’s talk,” said Mrs. Weigand, “But then he’s still a child.”

“That’s true,” Köves conceded.

“He scarcely knew his father. And it’s no use my trying to explain …,” Mrs. Weigand fell silent, the sad little pools glittering moistly in the wintry landscape of her face. “Can one explain that at all?” she eventually asked, and Köves admitted:

“That’s hard.”

“So,” the woman said, “Is my son perhaps right? Is it really shameful?”

“I suppose,” Köves gave it some thought, “I suppose it is. Shameful. Notwithstanding the fact,” he added with a shrug of the shoulders, “that one can’t help it: one is carted off and perishes.”

Once more they said nothing, then the woman exclaimed, again in her deep voice, though it still sounded brittle, like a wire which is about to snap:

“What perpetual pangs of guilt it causes: bringing a child into the world!.. One never gets over it! And into a world like this, of all places …”

“The world,” Köves tried to console her, “is always difficult.”

Yet the woman may not even have heard him:

“I sometimes feel he hates me for it … blames me,” she said. “And I don’t know,” she went on, “I don’t know if, all things considered, he might not be right … what does he have to look forward to? What else will he have to go through?”

“And that … that’s his special pastime?” Köves put in quickly, fearing that he would find the woman breaking out in tears.

“The chess, you mean?” Mrs. Weigand asked. “He wants to be a contender in tournaments.”

“Ah! In tournaments! Nice,” Köves nodded appreciatively; it seemed they were over the hard bit, and he had managed to divert the woman’s mind away from her futile brooding and into an easier channel.

“He’s in training right now, preparing for some youth championship,” Mrs. Weigand continued. “He keeps saying that he has to win the championship. He has to be a great player, really great,” and one could tell from her voice that she was now citing her son’s words, with a hint of playful hands-off-ishness yet also of hidden seriousness.

“I see.” Köves was suddenly somehow reminded of Sziklai, and he could not help continuing with his words: “One has to make a success of something.”

“Yes.” Mrs. Weigand smiled the way mothers smile over their ambitious sons, sceptically yet with a degree of pride.

“Success is the only way out.” Köves still had a good recall of what Sziklai had said, all the more as he had since heard it repeatedly from him.

“That’s right,” the woman said, nodding. “He says that with his physique it’s no use trying in another branch of sport. There you are, see,” she added. “He has powers of judgement … that in itself is something, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is!” said Köves. “Let’s just hope,” and here he too broke into a broad, one could say jovial, smile. “Let’s just hope he has the makings of a grandmaster!”

On that note, they took leave of each other, Köves putting on his coat and saying he was going to the South Seas to dine. The next morning, after the by then routine sounds of muffled squabbling outside his door, followed by the loud slamming of the front door, he promptly got up, his first foray taking him straight to the authorities. Getting his temporary residence permit endorsed as permanent, it seemed to Köves, was a pure formality; they had just copied his particulars from the one paper to another, and there was just one section to ask him about which — so it seemed — had not been filled out:

“Your workplace?” The question though, it was clear, was by no means as subsidiary as the manner in which it was put to him, like a conditioned reflex — ready and waiting for a notification that was foreseen and at most unknown as to its specifics — because when the female clerk heard the answer: “None,” she raised her head with such a look of amazement at Köves as he stood before her desk that it seemed almost one of terror.

“You’re not working?” she asked, to which Köves replied:

“No.”

“How can that be?” In her astonishment, the female clerk may have forgotten for a moment about even her official position, her voice sounding just the way it would when one person asks something of another, simply because she had become curious.

“I’ve been dismissed,” said Köves, and the clerk now stared at the half-completed ID, visibly racking her brains, as though some difficulty had cropped up in her work. Then, slapping down her pen, she suddenly got to her feet and hurried off to a distant desk, whispered something to the man who was sitting there, at which he too looked in amazement first at the female clerk and then at Köves, waiting farther off, before finally rising from his place and coming over to him along with the clerk:

“You have no workplace?” he asked, his censoriously knitted brow proclaiming that, for whatever reason, he was angry with Köves; Köves for his part repeated:

“None.”